What is the effect of a life‐threatening pandemic at the societal level? An expanded Theory of Social Change, Cultural Evolution, and Human Development predicts that, during a period of increasing survival threat and decreasing prosperity, humans will shift toward the psychology and behavior typical of the small‐scale, collectivistic, and rural subsistence ecologies in which we evolved. In particular, subjective mortality salience, engagement in subsistence activities, and collectivism will all increase, while the aspiration to be wealthy will decrease. Because coronavirus has forced unprecedented proportions of human activity online, we tested hypotheses derived from the theory by analyzing big data samples for 70 days before and 70 days after the coronavirus pandemic stimulated President Trump to declare a national emergency. Google searches were used for an exploratory study; the exploratory study was followed by three independent replications on Twitter, internet forums, and blogs. Across all four internet platforms, terms related to subjective mortality salience, engagement in subsistence activities, and collectivism showed massive increases. These findings, coupled with prior research testing this theory, indicate that humans may have an evolutionarily conditioned response to the level of death and availability of material resources in society. More specifically, humans may shift their behavior and psychology toward that found in subsistence ecologies under conditions of high mortality and low prosperity or, conversely, toward behavior and psychology found in modern commercial ecologies under conditions of low mortality and high prosperity.

Instagram is a popular photo-sharing application. Viewers interact with those who post photographs through registering “likes” and making comments. This experiment investigated what kinds of photos teenagers “like.” Two teenagers created and selected photo stimuli of different types and posted them to their existing Instagram accounts. In this way, the authors ensured a high degree of ecological validity. The research design called for 16 photos in each of the following eight categories: peer, romantic relationship, solo activity, selfie, family, violence, nature, and food. In the categories of peer, romantic relationship, solo activity, selfie, and family, half the pictures included the person posting and half did not. Hypothesis 1 states that the pattern of “likes” would reflect adolescent developmental issues: as a group, peer relations, romantic relations, identity formation, and independence from family would receive the most “likes.” Hypothesis 2 states that photos that included the person posting gather more “likes” than photos that did not. Both hypotheses were confirmed by the pattern of “likes” elicited by the posted photographs. Thus adolescent Instagram use, like the adolescent use of other social networking tools, indicates that the same developmental issues are expressed online and offline. The fact that teens prefer Instagram photos in which the person posting appears (as shown by the increased amount of “likes”) indicates that the narcissistic tendencies of creating and editing a social network profile are driven not just by the individual; they are also driven by the audience.

Based on the theory of social change, cultural evolution, and human development, we propose a mechanism whereby increased danger in society causes predictable shifts in valued forms of intelligence: 1. Practical intelligence rises in value relative to abstract intelligence; and 2. social intelligence shifts from measuring how well individuals can negotiate the social world to achieve their personal aims to measuring how well they can do so to achieve group aims. We document these shifts during the COVID-19 pandemic and argue that they led to an increase in the size and strength of social movements.

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