ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2020
The pandemic exposes human nature: 10 evolutionary insights.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 30 papers.
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Who cites it
30 citing papers in PubMed.
- Disinformation, Psychosocial Vulnerability, and Media Trust in the Digital Era: Implications for Health Behaviour and Societal Resilience.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- The role of the behavioral immune system in the expression of short and long-term orientation in young Chilean men during the COVID-19 pandemic.BMC public health · 2025Article
- Socioeconomic conditions exacerbated by the coronavirus in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa.Frontiers in public health · 2025Article
- Temporal clustering of social interactions trades-off disease spreading and knowledge diffusion.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2024Article
- Salience of infectious diseases did not increase xenophobia during the COVID-19 pandemic.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
- COVID-19 vaccination and the behavioral immune system: The newcomer and the old friend get along in preventing infection.Brain, behavior, & immunity - health · 2023Article
- Insights into the accuracy of social scientists' forecasts of societal change.Nature human behaviour · 2023Article
- Editorial: Evolutionary mechanisms of infectious diseases, volume II.Frontiers in microbiology · 2023Article
- The future of evolutionary medicine: sparking innovation in biomedicine and public health.Frontiers in science · 2023Article
- On Citing Dobzhansky about the Significance of Evolution to Biology.Integrative organismal biology (Oxford, England) · 2023Article
- Surveying the experience of postdocs in the United States before and during the COVID-19 pandemic.eLife · 2022Article
- Perception of strong social norms during the COVID-19 pandemic is linked to positive psychological outcomes.BMC public health · 2022Article
- NLRP3 inflammasome activation and SARS-CoV-2-mediated hyperinflammation, cytokine storm and neurological syndromes.International journal of physiology, pathophysiology and pharmacology · 2022Review
- Rethinking the health implications of society-environment relationships in built areas: An assessment of the access to healthy and hazards index in the context of COVID-19.Landscape and urban planning · 2022Article
- Article
- Pathogen infection-responsive nanoplatform targeting macrophage endoplasmic reticulum for treating life-threatening systemic infection.Nano research · 2022Article
- Sociality and disease: behavioral perspectives in ecological and evolutionary immunology.Behavioral ecology and sociobiology · 2022Article
- Host Manipulation Mechanisms of SARS-CoV-2.Acta biotheoretica · 2021Article
- Personality correlates of COVID-19 infection proclivity: Extraversion kills.Personality and individual differences · 2021Article
- What Role Does Pathogen-Avoidance Psychology Play in Pandemics?Trends in cognitive sciences · 2021Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
12 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Humans and viruses have been coevolving for millennia. Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19) has been particularly successful in evading our evolved defenses. The outcome has been tragic-across the globe, millions have been sickened and hundreds of thousands have died. Moreover, the quarantine has radically changed the structure of our lives, with devastating social and economic consequences that are likely to unfold for years. An evolutionary perspective can help us understand the progression and consequences of the pandemic. Here, a diverse group of scientists, with expertise from evolutionary medicine to cultural evolution, provide insights about the pandemic and its aftermath. At the most granular level, we consider how viruses might affect social behavior, and how quarantine, ironically, could make us susceptible to other maladies, due to a lack of microbial exposure. At the psychological level, we describe the ways in which the pandemic can affect mating behavior, cooperation (or the lack thereof), and gender norms, and how we can use disgust to better activate native "behavioral immunity" to combat disease spread. At the cultural level, we describe shifting cultural norms and how we might harness them to better combat disease and the negative social consequences of the pandemic. These insights can be used to craft solutions to problems produced by the pandemic and to lay the groundwork for a scientific agenda to capture and understand what has become, in effect, a worldwide social experiment.
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