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UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson not too long ago recommended that coronavirus infections are larger within the UK than Germany or Italy as a result of Britons love freedom extra, and discover it more durable to stick to manage measures.

Unsurprisingly, this view has attracted a variety of criticism. Some have argued that Germany and Italy love freedom simply as a lot because the UK . Others counsel the distinction is right down to the standard of those nations’ check and hint methods.

There’s no laborious proof to show Boris Johnson improper, however throughout the Atlantic, economist Paul Krugman has recommended one thing comparable. The US’s poor pandemic response, he says, is right down to politicians and coverage failing to get folks to behave responsibly. Loving freedom is, in his eyes, the excuse for “America’s cult of selfishness”.

Whereas we will’t 100% pinpoint the explanations behind the excessive case numbers in Britain and America, it’s fascinating to see the UK prime minister and a Nobel laureate making comparable arguments. Simply how believable are their claims?

The ability of individualism

“Loving freedom” is tough to measure, nevertheless it’s associated to the idea of individualism. This cultural trait emphasises private freedom and standing out, and celebrates particular person success. Its reverse is collectivism, which accentuates the embeddedness of people in a bunch and stresses the necessity to assist and be taught from the social surroundings.

The foundational work on individualism was accomplished by the Dutch social psychologist Geert Hofstede. He developed a framework to match totally different cultures alongside six dimensions. These are: how individualist or collectivist a society is, how indulgent it’s, what its attitudes in the direction of energy and alter are, the way it offers with uncertainty, and the way masculine or female its values are.

Inside this framework, individualism versus collectivism has turned out to be probably the most sturdy and protracted distinction between totally different cultures. Nevertheless, on Hofstede’s scale, present-day Germany and Italy are each individualist societies, even when the UK and US high the size. Johnson’s view of Italy and Germany appears to be caught within the 1930s.

The specter of tropical illness would be the foundation of why some societies are extra individualistic than others.

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The roots of those cultural values might be linked to historic patterns of illness depth throughout societies. In areas the place the specter of infectious illness was larger, such because the tropics, societies developed to be extra collectivist to counter these threats. Low ranges of interplay with strangers, which characterise collectivist societies, served as an essential defence towards an infection. In distinction, individualistic societies had extra various social networks and fewer reliance on steady patterns of social interplay, making contagion extra doubtless.

Importantly, these cultural traits nonetheless have real-world impacts at this time. They don’t simply form social norms, but in addition drive financial behaviour, for instance. Analysis reveals having a extra individualistic tradition results in extra innovation and progress, as a result of such societies connect larger social standing to innovators.

However there are additionally drawbacks. Whereas individualistic societies could have an edge in fostering radical innovation, Hofstede argues they’re at an obstacle in terms of speedy collective motion and coordination. It is because folks there are inspired to have totally different views, converse their thoughts, and query and debate selections. Constructing the consensus wanted for insurance policies to work could take longer.

Has social tradition influenced COVID?

COVID-19 has reached nearly each nation on this planet, and but has resulted in very totally different outcomes. Up to now, epidemiologists have provided quite a few explanations for this disparity, together with variations in demographics, urbanisation, high quality of well being methods, the pure surroundings, and the velocity of presidency responses.

Nevertheless, we argue that tradition additionally issues. As a result of consensus is extra readily achieved in collectivist societies, their situations are higher for introducing quick and efficient motion to include illness. These nations even have robust social mechanisms based mostly round disgrace and never desirous to “lose face”, which can drive compliance with management measures, making authorities actions more practical.

Folks in individualistic nations could have wider social networks.

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Social networks in collectivist societies additionally are typically extra localised and oriented in the direction of folks’s shut contacts (sometimes their prolonged household). This creates pure social bubbles, lowers social mixing and variety, and due to this fact slows down the unfold of the virus.

And at a person stage, cultural values can affect private selections on such basic items as carrying a face masks or preserving social distance. There’s already work exhibiting that within the US, in areas with a historical past of frontier settlements and a extra individualistic tradition, individuals are much less more likely to put on face masks and socially distance.

Provided that cross-country knowledge on individualism is publicly out there, it’s not tough to start to guage the way it pertains to COVID-19. knowledge from early on within the pandemic – when variations between individualist and collectivist nations have been more likely to be most pronounced, given the possibly totally different speeds of their responses – there’s a uncooked correlation between COVID-related deaths per capita and nations’ individualism scores. This correlation stays after we evaluate individualism scores with nations’ deaths per variety of instances, to manage for various quantities of testing.

Nations’ individualism scores plotted towards COVID-19 deaths per variety of instances. Information from Could 2020.

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On this graph, the individualistic UK (high proper, labelled GB) might be in contrast with collectivist Japan (centre, backside). Each nations are democratic and have extremely developed economies, however Japan has an older inhabitants than the UK – so we might maybe anticipate its COVID-19 outcomes to be worse. But it scores a lot better.

This graph is only a easy correlation. Really what’s wanted is one thing that controls for different components (demographics, urbanisation and so forth) and that takes into consideration extra deaths attributable to COVID-19. However for now, it reveals that the individualism speculation is value investigating additional. That is one thing we’re now doing.

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