A new paper on behavioral regulation under the collective threat of the COVID-19 pandemic led by Raphael Uricher (a doctoral student at Stanford University, and former member of the Uchida Lab) in collaboration with IFOHS’ Associate Professor Masataka Nakayama and Professor Yukiko Uchida has been published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology.

 While previous research has suggested that historical collective threats shape cultural differences, the connection to specific psychological and behavioral tendencies remained unclear. Previous work has shown that, in everyday situations, East Asians tend to prefer adjustment strategies to external circumstances, while Westerners tend to prefer influence strategies that help to actively change their situation. However, few studies have examined if these findings hold true also under extraordinary circumstances, such as a global pandemic.

To answer this question, the research team conducted an online survey between August and December 2020 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. The results showed that Japanese perceived both themselves and others as engaging in higher levels of adjustment—both normatively and in practice—compared to European-Americans. In contrast, European-Americans perceived greater influence from various social actors—such as friends, subordinates, superiors, and local governments—than did Japanese participants. Furthermore, in a scenario of encountering a person without a mask on a train, Americans were more likely to use influencing strategies, such as directly confronting the individual, compared to Japanese.

These findings suggest that cultural differences in behavioral regulation strategies appear to persist in the face of major collective threats such as a global pandemic, and may therefore contribute to policy-making to in preparation for future collective threats.

The article is open access and available at the following link.

For further details in Japanese, please refer to the Kyoto University PDF.