Keeping up with the herd: : Social comparison, risk, and resilience in COVID-19 era

Government regulators and communications practitioners worldwide have sought novel resilience models amid heightened rates of psychological distress caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. We examined perceived life satisfaction as a dimension of the risk resilience model. Additionally, we analyzed the influence of social comparison in order to investigate the assumption that pandemic severity at the country/region-level could moderate the risk resilience model’s structural relationships. Surveying 17 countries/regions and more than 35,000 valid samples, we found that (1) Perceived life satisfaction alleviated psychological distress across all 17 countries/regions; and 2) Country/region-level pandemic severity moderated the relationships among COVID-19 symptom experience, perceived life satisfaction, and psychological distress. The effects of COVID-19 symptom experience and perceived life satisfaction on psychological distress were conditional. We discuss possible mechanisms behind our findings and provide practical implications for mitigating psychological distress during public health crises.