Human transilience in the face of adversities

The world is being confronted with global crises (e.g., extreme weather events, natural disasters, pandemics, financial crises and political upheavals), many of which will likely become more frequent and severe in the future. We propose that amidst these unprecedented challenges lies a remarkable potential. Instead of merely preserving and/or recovering what we had (typically referred to as “bouncing back” or resilience), crises can make us challenge the status quo, find new opportunities and change for the better. This PhD dissertation introduces the novel construct transilience, defined as the perceived capacity to persist (persistence), adapt flexibly (adaptability), and positively transform (transformability) in the face of an adversity.

We first investigated whether people perceive they can do more than ‘bounce back’ to the status quo when confronted with large-scale adversities. Second, we examined whether  people who strongly perceive transilience in the face of an adversity are more likely to engage in adaptive actions and to show good mental health. Across a series of empirical studies focusing on climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic in different Western countries, we found that people on average perceive they can be transilient, both at the individual and at the collective level. Furthermore, our results suggest that higher transilience indeed promotes engagement in adaptation actions and good mental health, in the face of different adversities, across different socio-political contexts and levels of threat severity. Yet, transilience may not promote adaptive actions and mental health when people’s freedom to act is seriously restricted (for example during a strict lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic). All in all, this PhD dissertation opens up broader and hopeful pathways for our understanding of how humans can adapt to the unavoidable global crises of our time.

Dissertation: https://hdl.handle.net/11370/c1cb0a39-92e8-4b4c-815b-7bbda60682a4