The Role of Wisdom and Social Support on Resilience

The SARS-CoV-2 virus that has produced the COVID-19 disease outbreak has disrupted life throughout the globe. To control this spread, shutdowns of cities and quarantine orders have been put in place by respective governments, but at the consequence of increasing rates of social isolation and frustration amongst citizens. Recent studies on resilience have reported benefits in confronting adverse life events and as a protective factor against psychopathology, with these results differing across social groups. A variety of psychological factors have also been shown to drive individual differences in resilience, with wisdom, epistemic humility and perception of social support playing an important role in mediating this difference. As such, this present study focuses on the role these factors play in predicting resilience in the context of the different types of challenges faced during the Covid-19 pandemic across three different groups: an undergraduate sample, a general US sample and a Malaysian sample. Results show that wisdom, epistemic humility and social support are positively correlated with resilience, while only wisdom and epistemic humility were found to mediate the impact of the pandemic. Future studies in understanding the full psychological impacts of the pandemic are still required to better understand the psychological reasonings behind these results.