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Did the COVID-19 pandemic bring people together or push them apart? While infectious diseases tend to push people apart, crises can also bring people together through positive interdependence. We studied this question by asking an international sample (N = 1,006) about their inclinations to cooperate, perceptions of interdependence (i.e., shared fate), and perceived risk as well as local prevalence of COVID-19 infection across 14 time points from March to August, 2020. While perceived interdependence with others tended to increase during this time period, inclinations to cooperate decreased over time. At the within-person level, higher local prevalence of COVID-19 attenuated increases in perceived interdependence with others, and was associated with lower inclinations to cooperate. At the between-person level, people with high perceived interdependence with others reported more stable, or increasing, inclinations to cooperate over time than people with low perceived interdependence. Establishing a high sense of perceived interdependence with others may thus allow people to maintain cooperation during crises, even in the face of challenging circumstances such as those posed by a highly transmissible virus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human foragers are obligately group-living, and their high dependence on mutual aid is believed to have characterized our species' social evolution. It was therefore a central adaptive problem for our ancestors to avoid damaging the willingness of other group members to render them assistance. Cognitively, this requires a predictive map of the degree to which others would devalue the individual based on each of various possible acts. With such a map, an individual can avoid socially costly behaviors by anticipating how much audience devaluation a potential action (e.g., stealing) would cause and weigh this against the action's direct payoff (e.g., acquiring). The shame system manifests all of the functional properties required to solve this adaptive problem, with the aversive intensity of shame encoding the social cost. Previous data from three Western(ized) societies indicated that the shame evoked when the individual anticipates committing various acts closely tracks the magnitude of devaluation expressed by audiences in response to those acts. Here we report data supporting the broader claim that shame is a basic part of human biology. We conducted an experiment among 899 participants in 15 small-scale communities scattered around the world. Despite widely varying languages, cultures, and subsistence modes, shame in each community closely tracked the devaluation of local audiences (mean r = +0.84). The fact that the same pattern is encountered in such mutually remote communities suggests that shame's match to audience devaluation is a design feature crafted by selection and not a product of cultural contact or convergent cultural evolution.