Pathogens shape human collective conceptual processing

Infectious disease has been a major cause of death throughout human history. The human cultural evolution framework assumes that these stress variables have broadly shaped human psychology. However, how it affects basic cognitive components is largely unknown. Using historical data from the past century in the US, UK, Italy, and China, the research found that pathogen severity variation was associated with significant changes in the collective semantic space, as reflected in language, in similar ways across the countries. In all four countries, increasing pathogen severity led to increased use of words about sensory-motor properties, tight social relations and traditional values, robust against alternative stress variables, such as war, natural disaster or general economic growth. These results highlight the universal dynamic mechanisms of semantics and the effect of pathogens in driving sensorial, tight/traditional-value oriented semantic processing.