I think that one psychological factor that became apparent at the earliest stages of the pandemic is that a lot of people’s first instinct is to place blame. Instead of coming together to combat a very deadly virus, certain groups prioritized condemning China, and more troubling they automatically resorted to racist attacks on Chinese people. Redirecting and taking out anger is not a new concept in psychology, but psychologists were able to examine modern vilification on a global scale. In addition to that there were also a ton of new studies done, like the effects of isolation on education, work performance, etc … The pandemic has given psychology unique conditions to learn about human behavior, but I do not consider any of this to be a positive thing. In psychology, and most sciences, there is a large emphasis on ethics. So, even if the pandemic led to new developments in psychology, I would still consider those insights to be a net negative change in the field simply because of how many people were sick and hospitalized with, and died from COVID-19. I understand that researchers did not subject people to COVID-19 for experimental purposes, and psychologists are only observing the impacts of COVID, but any information they may have deduced came from an ethically horrible event. The same premise applies to data science, any data, statistics, and knowledge that data scientists have derived from the pandemic is not a positive net change in the field because this intelligence came from a largely fatal occurrence. Development is good, but not when development occurs because of wide scale death and hospitalization. I think that any discoveries made about the psychology of, or any data on, people during a pandemic should be used to better the mental health and wellbeing of everyone who was and continues to be affected by COVID-19, but I think it is imperative that these findings are not celebrated, rather they should honor how much loss happened.