Pathogen-prevalence hypothesis suggests that the global pandemic of the COVID一19 enhances collectivism and weakens individualism. Existing studies have found that people in an epidemic show more expressions of collectivism, valuing social responsibility and working together to counteract the spread of the disease; others have found that people show higher levels of individualism as they pay more attention to personal hygiene and isolation from the crowd to prevent being infected with the New Coronavirus. Both China and Japan are countries that favor a predominantly collectivist approach; whether collectivism increases in both countries after an epidemic; and whether the severity of the COVID一19 epidemic is significantly associated with changes in collectivism. In addition, both China and Japan have areas of the voluntary frontier settlement, and according to the voluntary frontier settlement hypothesis, individualism is usually stronger than collectivism. Therefore, whether the COVID一19 epidemic is significantly correlated with the change of collectivism in the voluntary frontier regions.
In this paper, we accessed four newspaper websites based on a web crawler program, Wuxi Daily and Shenzhen Special Zone Daily in China and Ryodan Shimbun and Hokkaido Daily in Japan, to obtain news data from September 2019 to May 2020. First, the word frequency values of collectivism and individualism in Chinese and Japanese were counted separately using word frequency analysis; second, the changes of collectivism expressions before and after the epidemic in China and Japan were analyzed by ANOVA，as well as the differences between collectivism in the topographic regions of China and Japan were examined; finally, the severity of the epidemic was tested by regression analysis in combination with the epidemic infection data from various locations in China and Japan, and the correlation of collectivism.
The results found that (1) at the overall level, there was a significant difference in collectivism expression before and after the epidemic in both China and Japan, showing that collectivism was stronger after the epidemic than before it; (2) there was a significant change in collectivism expression in voluntary frontier areas in China and Japan, and the COVID一19 epidemic enhanced collectivism in voluntary frontier areas. The change in collectivism in mailand regions in China before and after the epidemic was significant compared to the change in collectivism in mainland regions in Japan; (3) the severity of the epidemic was significantly correlated with the change in collectivism in China and also significantly correlated with collectivism in voluntary frontier regions in China; while the severity of the epidemic was not significantly correlated with the change in collectivism in Japan.
This paper analyzes the differences in the expression of collectivism in newspaper news before and after the epidemic, and collectivism increased in both China and Japan after the epidemic, again validating the pathogen-prevalence hypothesis. Collectivism in the voluntary frontier regions also increased significantly after the outbreak, and this result provides a new perspective to explain the voluntary frontier settlement hypothesis. The correlation between the severity of the epidemic and the change in collectivism in both countries differed between China and Japan, and this differential result may provide some reference value for future cross-cultural studies.
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