Ecological Threats and Cultural Systems: Epidemics and Natural Disasters Do Not Predict Collectivism

Abstract

Considering the role of human interactions in infectious disease outbreaks and cooperation in mitigating natural disasters consequences, ecological threats to human survival have been among proposed drivers of collectivism. Utilizing established and novel measures of parasites stress and natural disasters, we investigated their association with collectivism in a large sample of countries (N = 188). Linear mixedeffect model indicated that after controlling for national wealth, neither natural disasters nor infectious disease can predict collectivism scores. Null results were consistent across different measures of threats, suggesting that previous findings can be attributed to small, non-representative samples of cultures. When universal patterns are a major concern, drawing conclusions based on small, non-representative subsets of cultures risks promoting unreliable findings. Future cross-cultural research will benefit from data-driven exploratory methods to uncover factors previously unexamined in the theory-driven studies of collectivism.

Keywords: parasites stress, pathogen prevalence, natural disasters, collectivism, individualism