Cultural Defaults in the Time of COVID: Lessons for the Future

Abstract

Five years after the beginning of the COVID pandemic, one thing is clear: The East Asian countries of Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea outperformed the United States in responding to and controlling the outbreak of the deadly virus. Although multiple factors likely contributed to this disparity, we propose that the culturally linked psychological defaults (“cultural defaults”) that pervade these contexts also played a role. Cultural defaults are commonsense, rational, taken-for-granted ways of thinking, feeling, and acting. In the United States, these cultural defaults include optimism and uniqueness, single cause, high arousal, influence and control, personal choice and self-regulation, and promotion. In Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea, these defaults include realism and similarity, multiple causes, low arousal, waiting and adjusting, social choice and social regulation, and prevention. In this article, we (a) synthesize decades of empirical research supporting these unmarked defaults; (b) illustrate how they were evident in the announcements and speeches of high-level government and organizational decision makers as they addressed the existential questions posed by the pandemic, including “Will it happen to me/us?” “What is happening?” “What should I/we do?” and “How should I/we live now?”; and (c) show the similarities between these cultural defaults and different national responses to the pandemic. The goal is to integrate some of the voluminous literature in psychology on cultural variation between the United States and East Asia particularly relevant to the pandemic and to emphasize the crucial and practical significance of meaning-making in behavior during this crisis. We provide guidelines for how decision makers might take cultural defaults into account as they design policies to address current and future novel and complex threats, including pandemics, emerging technologies, and climate change.