A new paper co-written by a team of Gies College of Business experts in cross-cultural consumer behavior finds a key cultural factor that promotes behavior aimed at curbing the spread of COVID‐19.

The activation of a collectivistic orientation – in which people construe the self as interdependent with others and are motivated to adjust their demands accordingly – is negatively associated with the spread of COVID‐19 and positively associated with the expectation to engage in widely publicized behaviors such as masking and vaccination that limit the spread of the virus, says published research from Carlos Torelli, the Zimmerman Faculty Fellow at the Gies.

“There is a cultural dimension to collectivism, both at the country level and at the individual level, that’s conducive to controlling COVID-19,” said Torelli, a professor of business administration and a co-author of the paper. “It’s somewhat counterintuitive in that collectivism often conjures images of large gatherings and big networks of people – which, to be frank, sound like super-spreader events.

“It’s true that people in cultures that value collectivism tend to congregate more and are physically closer to a larger network of people – but it’s also true that they focus a lot on what they think people in their networks ought to be doing to regulate their behavior. And that’s really what’s driving this control of the spread in places that are more collectivistic or people who think in more collectivistic terms.”