Abstract
Over the course of the year 2020, the global scientific community dedicated considerable effort to understanding COVID-19. In this review, we discuss some of the findings accumulated between the onset of the pandemic and the end of 2020, and argue that although COVID-19 is clearly a biological disease tied to a specific virus, the culture–mind relation at the heart of cultural psychology is nonetheless essential to understanding the pandemic. Striking differences have been observed in terms of relative mortality, transmission rates, behavioral responses, official policies, compliance with authorities, and even the extent to which beliefs about COVID-19 have been politicized across different societies and groups. Moreover, many minority groups have very different experiences of the pandemic relative to dominant groups, notably through existing health inequities as well as discrimination and marginalization, which we believe calls for a better integration of political and socioeconomic factors into cultural psychology and into the narrative of health and illness in psychological science more broadly. Finally, individual differences in, for example, intolerance of uncertainty, optimism, conspiratorial thinking, or collectivist orientation are influenced by cultural context, with implications for behaviors that are relevant to the spread and impact of COVID-19, such as mask-wearing and social distancing. The interplay between cultural context and the experience and expression of mental disorders continues to be documented by cultural-clinical psychology; the current work extends this thinking to infectious disease, with special attention to diseases spread by social contact and fought at least in part through social interventions. We will discuss cultural influences on the transmission, course, and outcome of COVID-19 at three levels: (1) cross-society differences; (2) within-society communities and intergroup relations; and (3) individual differences shaped by cultural context. We conclude by considering potential theoretical implications of this perspective on infectious disease for cultural psychology and related disciplines, as well as practical implications of this perspective on science communication and public health interventions.
Highlights
In 2020, the global scientific community published more than 70,000 articles on COVID-19 (Pujol, 2020)
We believe that cultural psychology has established the empirical tools to conduct research that is both rigorous and time-sensitive, while offering the conceptual tools to help us better understand how and why the picture may shift over time
Indigenous peoples in North America, Brazil, Australia and New Zealand have a higher risk of exposure, and have been diagnosed with more severe and fatal COVID-19 cases as a result of several factors, including health inequities that predate the pandemic, higher levels of frontline exposure, poverty, homelessness, displacement, overcrowding, and food and water insecurity (Arriagada et al, 2020; Furlong and Finnie, 2020; McLeod et al, 2020; Polidoro et al, 2020; Power et al, 2020; Saint-Girons et al, 2020; Yashadhana et al, 2020)
Summary
In 2020, the global scientific community published more than 70,000 articles on COVID-19 (Pujol, 2020). Group differences can highlight ways in which very different cultural contexts shape experience and behavior, we must keep in mind that every aggregate score conceals numerous individual people who might conform to, resist, amplify, deliberately rebel against, or vary from the local consensus Related to this perspective is cultural psychology’s emphasis on “unpacking culture”: starting by cataloging observations to be sure but moving toward explanations of why cultural group differences are observed (Heine and Norenzayan, 2006). The social transmission of infectious diseases means that their spread, and their impact on a population, is driven in part by social behaviors which, in turn, are shaped by patterns of culturally shared beliefs in that population This perspective has parallels in social psychological approaches that have proven useful in public health, such as the theory of planned behavior, in which personal attitudes, perceived social norms, and sense of control combine to predict health-relevant behavioral intentions (e.g., Godin and Kok, 1996; Montaño and Kasprzyk, 2015). Even when the researcher has chosen to narrow in on a particular aspect of a disorder— for example, how the novel coronavirus interacts with lung tissue (disease), or the subjective experience of determining whether one’s breathing problems are sufficient to warrant a hospital visit (illness), or local beliefs that stigmatize the recovering patient as having been careless or unclean (sickness)—the larger goal ought to be incorporation of these findings into an integrated scientific narrative
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