How a campus shooting did (and did not) change students’ daily activity and beliefs about the world

How do students’ beliefs about the world and their everyday exploratory behaviors change after a mass campus shooting? In the present longitudinal study, an on- campus shooting occurred in the middle of data collection, resulting in an unplanned natural experiment to investigate how world beliefs can impact behavior after a traumatic event. Over three 2-week waves of data collection, with the shooting happening in the middle of the second wave, we measured students’ general beliefs about the world (their primal world beliefs), daily physical movement, the activities they were doing, how typical those activities were, and how close participants were to friends if they were with them. Unsurprisingly, students had less exploratory movement patterns immediately following the shooting. However, we found that only after the shooting did beliefs that the world is safe predict how much people physically explored their environment, and beliefs that the world is enticing predicted how varied a person’s activities were. Also, these primal world beliefs did not significantly change from before the shooting to after, demonstrating their stability. We speculate that the post-shooting campus environment was more ambiguous than the pre-shooting environment, allowing beliefs about the world to have a greater influence on behavior.