Han Nuo, Ren Xiaopeng, Wu Peijing, Liu Xiaoqian, Zhu Tingshao
CAS Key Laboratory of Behavioral Science, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
Department of Psychology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
Front Psychol. 2021 Apr 20;12:632204. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.632204. eCollection 2021.
The pathogen-prevalence hypothesis postulates that collectivism would be strengthened in the long term in tandem with recurrent attacks of infectious diseases. However, it is unclear whether a one-time pathogen epidemic would elevate collectivism. The outbreak of COVID-19 and the widespread prevalence of online social networks have provided researchers an opportunity to explore this issue. This study sampled and analyzed the posts of 126,165 active users on Weibo, a leading Chinese online social network. It used independent-sample -tests to examine whether COVID-19 had an impact on Chinese collectivistic value-related behaviors by comparing the usage frequency of personal pronouns, group-related words, and relationship-related words before and after the outbreak. Overall, most collectivist words exhibited a significant upward trend after the outbreak. In turn, this tendency pointed to a rising sense of collectivism (versus individualism). Hence, this study confirmed the pathogen-prevalence hypothesis in real settings, finding that an outbreak of an infectious disease such as COVID-19 could exert an impact on collectivism and may deliver a theoretical basis for psychological protection against the threat of COVID-19. However, further evaluation is required to ascertain whether this trend is universal or culture-specific.
病原体流行假说假定，从长远来看，集体主义会随着传染病的反复侵袭而得到强化。然而，一次性的病原体流行是否会提升集体主义尚不清楚。新冠疫情的爆发以及在线社交网络的广泛普及为研究人员提供了一个探讨这个问题的机会。本研究对中国领先的在线社交网络微博上126,165名活跃用户的帖子进行了采样和分析。通过比较疫情爆发前后个人代词、群体相关词汇和关系相关词汇的使用频率，使用独立样本t检验来考察新冠疫情是否对中国人与集体主义价值观相关的行为产生影响。总体而言，大多数集体主义词汇在疫情爆发后呈现出显著的上升趋势。相应地，这种趋势表明集体主义（相对于个人主义）意识在增强。因此，本研究在现实情境中证实了病原体流行假说，发现诸如新冠疫情这样的传染病爆发可能会对集体主义产生影响，并可能为抵御新冠疫情威胁的心理保护提供理论依据。然而，需要进一步评估以确定这种趋势是普遍的还是特定于文化的。
