As an experiment, I asked both ChatGPT and Claude to give me a summary of whatever findings have so far appeared in scholarly journals in sociology and psychology. I then fed ChatGPT's response to Claude and vice versa and asked each bot to compare its own output with the other bots and point out any discrepancies or differences in emphasis or interpretation between the two. Finally, I asked each to create a new, shorter summary based on both of their findings. I then read through them to look for obvious errors or inadequacies.
I chose Claude's version here, edited lightly by me, because it is shorter.
Introduction
The COVID-19 pandemic did real psychological and social damage, but less evenly and less catastrophically than early headlines suggested. Its most lasting effects may be on everyday routines and on people who were still developing when it hit.
In spring 2020, billions of people stopped going to school, work, restaurants and each other's homes almost overnight. No ethical researcher could ever design that experiment. Yet it happened, and social scientists have spent six years measuring the results.
There are three questions considered:
There is a great deal of evidence on the first question, less on the second, and a growing body on the third. The third may matter most.
Mental health: a big number and a small number
Two findings about mental health seem to contradict each other, and learning why they seem to do that is one of the best lessons this research offers.
The big number. A 2021 study in The Lancet estimated that cases of major depression and anxiety disorders rose by roughly a quarter worldwide in 2020. Young people and women were hit hardest. Follow-up studies years later still find more distress among younger people, women and frontline healthcare workers, who remained at higher risk of anxiety, depression and sleep problems at least a year after the pandemic ended.
The small number. Studies that followed the same people before and during lockdown found much smaller average changes. Prati and Mancini (2021) combined 25 such studies with about 72,000 participants. Lockdowns had small effects on anxiety and depression, and no significant effect on loneliness, general distress or suicide risk. Results varied a great deal between studies, and the authors concluded that most people were psychologically resilient. Later reviews of 65 cohorts (Robinson et al., 2022) and 134 cohorts (Sun et al., 2023) found similar modest average changes, with early increases that largely recovered.
How both can be true. The Lancet figure is a modelled estimate of clinical cases; the cohort reviews measure average symptom scores. A small upward shift across a whole population can push many people over a clinical threshold. An average can also hide a minority who suffered badly alongside a majority who coped, or even felt better. Some young people in UK interviews described lockdown as a welcome break from social pressure.
One harm is not captured by mood surveys at all: a meta-analysis by Piquero and colleagues (2021) found reported domestic violence rose under stay-at-home orders.
The most striking findings concern people who were still developing in 2020. A 50-year-old may have had established habits interrupted; a 4-year-old or a 14-year-old lost months of a formative stage.
Teen brains. A Stanford team had been scanning Bay Area adolescents for an unrelated depression study when the pandemic struck. Comparing 163 young people scanned before and after the shutdowns, they found that the later group had more internalizing problems, such as anxiety and depression, and brains that looked structurally older. That pattern is usually seen only in children who have faced chronic adversity like neglect or family violence. A University of Washington study (PNAS, 2024) found brain maturation sped up by an average of 4.2 years in girls and 1.4 years in boys. Neither team yet knows whether these changes are permanent or what they mean for later mental health.
Preschoolers' social understanding. Scott, Nguyentran and Sullivan (2024) tested children aged 3½ to 5½ on false-belief understanding: the ability to grasp that another person can believe something untrue. Children tested after lockdown did significantly worse, even after controlling for age and language skills, and the gap was larger for children from lower-income families. Because the study compared two different groups of children rather than following the same ones, it cannot show whether the gap persists.
Personality offers a related clue. Sutin and colleagues (2022) found that adults under 30 became slightly less extraverted, open, agreeable and conscientious during 2021–22. Adult personality is normally quite stable, so even a small shift is notable.
The clearest evidence of lasting change is in behaviour: how often people meet, where they spend time and where they work.
Workplaces are social institutions, not just economic ones. Where people work shapes friendships, mentoring, commuting and the life of downtowns.
The pandemic was not one shared experience. Someone with a secure salary, a spacious home and a job they could do on a laptop lived a different lockdown from someone in precarious work or crowded housing.
Research on social trust, the belief that most people are honest and reliable, shows this clearly. A York University team analyzed national Canadian samples from 2019 to early 2021. People facing economic hardship, who already trusted others less, saw that trust erode further, while higher-income Canadians' trust grew. The pandemic widened an existing "trust gap." A 20,000-person survey in France, Germany, Spain and the UK found lockdowns heightened worries about income and, in some groups, distrust of institutions.
Other studies push back on the idea that the pandemic destroyed social cohesion. Swiss household panel data show a sharp dip in social trust in spring 2020, followed by a quick return to earlier levels for most people. Trust, it seems, tends to bounce back to a personal "set point." What changed more was trust in governments, which rose and fell with how people judged the handling of the crisis.
When you review a pandemic study, ask four things:
The biggest open question is about cause. If people now work from home more, shop online more and see friends less, did lockdown create those preferences? Or did it remove social expectations that had kept people from acting on preferences they already had? The same behaviour supports two very different stories about who we have become.
References