Would you like to build your social resilience?
Published on March 6, 2010
Resilience as a property of a substance refers to its ability to recoil or
spring back into shape after bending, stretching, or being compressed. People
can also be more or less resilient, and in this context resilience refers to a
person's ability to withstand or recover quickly from difficult conditions. Most
people think about a person's resilience as a capacity that, akin to
intelligence or musical talent, does not vary substantially across contexts.
This view is odd given that the resilience of substances can vary a great deal
across contexts. For instance, water in a warm environment (i.e., when it is in
a liquid state) is much more resilient than water in a frozen environment (i.e.,
when it is in the solid state of ice).