Short-term Cultural Evolution in Response to COVID-19: Integrating Quantitative Analysis with AI-Assisted Thematic Analysis

Using Greenfield’s Theory of Social Change, Cultural Evolution, and Human Development as a framework, we examine psychological, cultural, and behavioral shifts in China during the first 70 days of COVID-19. We focus on three levels—mortality salience at the psychological level, collectivism at the cultural level, and subsistence activities at behavioral level. Our big-data sample consists of over 200,000 social media posts. Quantitatively, we found a significant increase in mentions of mortality salience, collectivism, and subsistence activities, consistent with prior results established in the U.S., Mexico, Indonesia, and Japan, suggesting a universal response to existential threat. Qualitatively, AI-assisted thematic analysis, an innovation of the present study, identified the most frequent recurring themes across three levels, which complemented the quantitative analysis by providing in-depth insight into the COVID experience. A methodological strength was to compare expert human coder to AI coding, establishing both the reliability and validity of AI coding.