Values in Crisis: Societal Value Change under Existential Insecurity

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a profound impact on societies, with possible consequences for their fundamental values. Inglehart’s revised modernization theory links societal values to the underlying subjective sense of existential security in a given society (scarcity hypothesis), while also claiming that influences on values diminish once individuals reach adulthood (socialization hypothesis). An acute existential crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic offers a rare opportunity to test these assumptions. We analyze data from representative surveys conducted in Japan shortly before and after the onset of the pandemic. Remaining survey sample differences are statistically controlled via propensity score weighting and regression adjustment, while post-stratification weights allow conclusions about the Japanese population. In three sets of analyses, we reveal that the pandemic and the experienced psychological distress are negatively associated with emancipative and secular values, entailing a reversal to traditionalism, intolerance, and religiosity. First, we document a substantial decline in both emancipative and secular values in the first months of the pandemic compared to five months earlier. This decline remained stable a year later. Second, we find that value change was stronger in prefectures more severely affected by the pandemic. Third, individuals who experienced higher psychological distress emphasized the same values more strongly, as evident in two surveys from May 2020 and April 2021. In contrast to the socialization hypothesis, our study provides evidence that, under extraordinary environmental conditions, values can shift even within a negligibly short time period.

COVID-19 Increased Mortality Salience, Collectivism, and Subsistence Activities: A Theory-Driven Analysis of Online Adaptation in the United States, Indonesia, Mexico, and Japan

“…The other model will explore the effect of the pandemic on concepts of family, authority, and religion; we have already developed a Twitter dataset on these concepts using the same timeline and the same four countries as in the present research. A newly published study (October 20, 2023) used the World Values Survey to explore effects of the pandemic on a similar set of values: family, authority, and religion, in Japan (Akaliyski et al, 2023). The basic idea is the same: that based on actual experiences of increased mortality, COVID created existential insecurity-what we term mortality salience-that moved these values in a direction opposite to the historically dominant direction of value change.…”

“…The inverse of our term mortality salience is their term existential security, the feeling that survival can be taken for granted. They note that, as existential security has risen in the world, societal cultures have come to value individual freedom or independence, including freedom from the family (Akaliyski et al, 2023). However, Inglehart and Welzel's theory differs in three important respects from our theoretical framework: (a) While it is similar in focusing on the sense of existential security vs. insecurity and on the value dimension of independenceinterdependence, it leaves out the activity dimension (e.g., we predict that when death rates are higher, people engage in more subsistence activities), which makes our theoretical framework a unique one Greenfield et al, 2003Greenfield et al, , 2021.…”