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See below for the transcript of Psychology, Pathogens, and Predictions: 

Hello, and welcome to the first, and only, episode of Psychology, Pathogens, and Predictions! Today’s podcast will focus on the shift in life strategies brought on by COVID-19 due to heavy pathogen presence, limited resources, and confrontation with mortality. This combination will, spoiler alert, lead to my prediction of more people taking the economic and personal risk of quitting their jobs. 

For the sake of all of those listening, who are not my cultural psychology professor, I’d like to first define what a life history strategy is. A life history strategy is a way people adapt and respond to their environment to ensure survival and reproduction. They are divided into two practices. Fast strategies and slow strategies. Those who adopt fast life strategies tend to have more casual relationships, more sexual partners, faster biological aging, higher impulsivity, and take more risks when presented with a potential reward (Griskevicius, Ackerman, Cantu, et al., 2013, p. 201). In comparison, those who are acting with a slow history strategy have more serious relationships, fewer sexual partners, slower biological aging, and generally avoid risk factors even if they could be presented with a reward (Griskevicius, Ackerman, Cantu, et al., 2013, p. 201). For those of you following along on the Omeka site, I invite you to click on the section, “Prove it!” For a fuller definition of life-history strategies click the first item, labeled, you guessed it, item one. To understand other physiological, mating, parenting, and reward orientation differences between strategies turn to item two. 

The global spread of the Coronavirus meant that mortality and sickness could not be managed in the same way that it was before. This caused people to adapt to faster life-strategy models (White, Li, Griskevicius, Neuberg and Kenrick, 2013, p. 715-722). I’d like to draw your attention to item three on the Omeka site. This chart, created with data from Hill, Boehm, and Prokosch’s research displays “correlations between measures of impulsiveness and vulnerability to illness (Hill, Boehm, and Prokosch, 2015, 121).” As you can see, there is a correlation between impulsiveness and vulnerability to illness. This means that the threat of illness changes how people act. Those who are more vulnerable to illness are more likely to act impulsively. Illness may predict impulsive actions. 

So, your question for me may become, “how do we know that COVID-19 threatened survival enough to cause a significant change in life-history strategies?” Well to begin with, as seen in data collected by Our World in Data, the death rate in the United States grew astronomically with the introduction of the COVID-19 pathogen (Ritchie, Mathieu, Rodes-Guirao et al., 2021, p.1). This is item number four if you are following along the Omeka site. However, we can also look at how people thought about death, and loosely related terms, following the initial spread of COVID-19. 

When looking at the Google search for the preparation and contemplation of death, we see a sharp increase after the initial start of the pandemic. Examples of such words include, “death”, “fear of death,” and “survive” (Evers and Greenfield, 2021, p. 107-126). You may look to item number four to see a visual representation of this data. The global introduction to COVID-19 surrounded people with physical death and encompassed people mentally by the perception of death. Both are factors that affect one’s life history strategies (Griskevicius, Ackerman, Cantu, et al., 2013, p. 201). 

Similar research was done when looking for how people interacted with materialism during the pandemic, compared to the months before. While there was an increase in thoughts of death, there were decreases in search terms related to material objects and wealth, such as cars and money (Evers and Greenfield, 2021, p. 107-126). This can be visualized on Omka by clicking item number five.

Pathogen prevalence is not the only indicator of a shift in life-history strategies that was prevalent during the initial COVID-19 lockdown. Research suggests that resource scarcity can also affect the rate of fast and slow life-history strategies (Varnum and Grossmann, 2020, 962). Although sensational, this was seen in the great toilet paper rush of 2020. To see videos of the shortage, click on the link in the sixth item of the Omeka site, you do not click on the title, but rather the description for access. In this video, you will see lines of people swarming around the available toilet paper in a Costco.

As your podcast host, Omka curator, and current cultural psychology student, it is my prediction that this sudden change in life-history strategies, indicated by increased exposure to death and mortality, and decline in material items will lead to the continuation of many people quitting their jobs – despite the economic scarcity that was triggered. I predict that this pattern will continue for the next year, even as vaccines and their boosters are increasing in numbers. 

It was discussed how the COVID-19 pathogen influenced the rate of people adopting fast life-history strategies. Referring back to item two, people who have fast life-history strategies tend to take higher risks and have a lower investment in offspring. This is why it is my prediction that quitting one’s job will continue to be popular as a result of COVID-19 and the shift in life-history strategies. Quitting one’s job is an economic risk that can affect the amount one can invest in their offspring. It is also one that can be impulsive – another factor that is heightened with the growth of fast life history strategy. 

We, and by “we” I mean I, also discussed how many people had to face the reality of mortality at much higher rates than ever before in their lifetime. For the first time, we were all collectively face-to-face with death as a result of COVID-19 and there was a drastic cultural change. In turn, the importance placed on material things also declined. If less emphasis is put on tangible, expensive things, and people are becoming more impulsive due to a changing life history strategy, then quitting one’s job no longer seems like an absurd thing. Because of this, I think that as long as people’s lives are affected by the COVID-19 pathogen and resource scarcity that comes with it, they will continue to quit their jobs at high rates, despite the increasing numbers of vaccinated people. Faster life strategies will continue to dominate within the next year. 

Even if you don’t decide to quit your job, I encourage you to reflect on how your life practices may have changed and developed over the past two years. How do you think about life and death differently now? How have your values changed? And with that, I thank you for taking the time to tune in to Psychology, Pathogens, and Predictions! This is your host Simona Graceffo, signing off. 

References 

Evers, N. F. G., Greenfield, P. M., & Evers, G. W. (2021). Covid ‐19 shifts mortality salience, activities, and values in the United States: Big data analysis of online adaptation. Human Behavior and Emerging Technologies, 3(1), 107–126. https://doi.org/10.1002/hbe2.251  

Griskevicius, V., Ackerman, J. M., Cantú, S. M., Delton, A. W., Robertson, T. E., Simpson, J. A., 

Thompson, M. E., & Tybur, J. M. (2013). When the economy falters, do people spend or save? responses to resource scarcity depend on childhood environments. Psychological Science, 24(2), 197–205. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797612451471  

Hill, S. E., Boehm, G. W., & Prokosch, M. L. (2016). Vulnerability to disease as a predictor of faster life-history strategies. Adaptive Human Behavior and Physiology, 2(2), 116–133. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40750-015-0040-6  

Ritchie, H., Mathieu, E., Rodés-Guirao, L., Appel, C., Giattino, C., Ortiz-Ospina, E., Hasell, J., Macdonald, B., Beltekian, D., & Roser, M. (2020, March 5). United States: Coronavirus pandemic country profile. Our World in Data. Retrieved November 29, 2021, from https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus/country/united-states#how-many-tests-are-performed-each-day.  

Varnum, M. E., & Grossmann, I. (2017). Cultural change: The how and the why. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 12(6), 956–972. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691617699971  

White, A. E., Li, Y. J., Griskevicius, V., Neuberg, S. L., & Kenrick, D. T. (2013). Putting all your eggs in one basket. Psychological Science, 24(5), 715–722. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797612461919