Infection changes social orientations: The effect of disease salience on shifts in individualism and collectivism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Collectivism and individualism are key indicators of social orientation changes under the threat of infectious diseases. Although previous studies have identified indirect relationships between infectious diseases and collectivism, none have directly tested causality. We used visual stimuli to heighten disease salience and directly tested whether collectivism and individualism changed before and after exposure among Japanese participants. In Study 1, the intervention was divided into two main conditions: infectious disease-related threats and non-related threats. In Study 2, disgust and fear—key factors in responses to disease threats—were isolated into four distinct conditions. The results showed that visual stimulation effectively heightened disease salience, leading to changes in collectivism and individualism. However, contrary to existing hypotheses suggesting an increase in collectivism, we consistently observed an increase in horizontal individualism. This study is the first to demonstrate a causal relationship between infectious disease threats and social orientations, while potentially suggesting that these threats drive a shift toward horizontal individualism rather than collectivism. • Infection-related visual cues activate the behavioral immune system via germ aversion. • Both infection and general threats shift social orientations, not just infection cues. • Horizontal individualism increases after exposure to disgust–fear combined stimuli. • Disgust alone increases vertical individualism; fear alone shows no significant effect. • Behavioral immune system activation causally alters social orientation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".