WE CAME BY IT HONESTLY:

It turns out Covid's deadliness depends on something simpler and more profound: cultural differences in our willingness to follow rules.

All cultures have social norms, or unwritten rules for social behaviour. We adhere to standards of dress, discipline our kids, and don't elbow our way through crowded subways not because these are legislative codes but because they help our society function. Psychologists have shown that some cultures abide by social norms quite strictly; they're tight. Others are loose - with a more relaxed attitude toward rule-breakers.

This distinction, first noticed by Herodotus, is in modern times capable of being quantified by psychologists and anthropologists. Relative to the US, the UK, Israel, Spain and Italy, countries like Singapore, Japan, China and Austria have been shown to be much tighter. These differences aren't random. Research in both nation-states and small-scale societies has shown that communities with histories of chronic threat - whether natural disasters, infectious diseases, famines or invasions - develop stricter rules that ensure order and cohesion. It makes good evolutionary sense: following rules helps us survive chaos and crisis. On the flipside, looser groups that have faced fewer threats can afford to be more permissive.

Neither type is better or worse - until a global pandemic hits. Back in March, I started to worry that loose cultures, with their rule-breaking spirit, would take longer to abide by public health measures, with potentially tragic consequences. I was hopeful that they would eventually tighten. All of our computer models prior to Covid suggested they would.

But they didn't. In research that tracked more than 50 countries, published this week in the Lancet Planetary Health, my team and I show that, taking into account other factors, loose cultures had five times the number of cases that tight cultures did, and more than eight times as many deaths.

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