On the Collective Moods of Booms and Busts: Socio-Psychological Foundations in External Shock Communication and Social Volatility in the COVID-19 Economic Fallout

The currently ongoing novel Coronavirus-crisis is an external shock coming down on society with direct impact on societal moods and subsequently connected economic changes. With growing digitalization and quickening of transfer speed, information exchange in the individual involvement to break trends online on a global scale may impose unknown systemic risks in causing social volatility in international economics. Research may explore how human beings’ communication and interaction results in socially constructed volatility that echoes in economic correlates. This paper proposes to explore the role of communication and temporal foci in pandemic communication to create social volatility underlying economic downturns with attention to international differences. Comparing the economic consequence of the endogenous crunch of the 2008 World Financial Recession with the external economic shock of the COVID-19 pandemic could aid to retrieve crisis-specific recovery recommendations. Understanding how the social compound forms economic outcomes promises to explain how market outcomes are developed in society and can be shaped by strategic communication with special attention to new media technologies.