The COVID-19 pandemic severely influenced human behavior due to governmental restrictions. In addition to administrative restrictions, other factors, like historical disease prevalence and culture might impact on recent behavior. The parasite stress theory of values and sociality predicts an influence of historical diseases on human culture and may be of important influence on current human behavioral responses towards the pandemic. To address the influence on behavior, we studied mask use in outdoor recreationists (N = 4863) from 53 cultures. Studying outdoor recreationists is advantageous because people have at least some choices over their mask use, and it is less strictly controlled. We hypothesize that pathogen prevalence and cultural values of a society predict mask usage above and beyond the simplistic explanation of the strength of the governmental pandemic-related restrictions. Our results indicate that societal variables, especially individualism, contribute to the mask use during leisure activities, with people from more individualistic societies reporting lesser mask usage. Further, historic pathogen prevalence has a significant influence on mask use, even when controlling for the stringency measures of the government, HDI and population density. Zoonotic disease richness, however, did not receive significance. A mediation model showed that historical pathogen prevalence had an indirect effect on mask use, via the two pathways collectivism-individualism and governmental regulations. The total effect size of pathogen prevalence on mask use was 0.61, and with 0.24 as direct, and 0.37 indirect effects. Our data fit into the parasite stress theory of values and sociality. Our results provide evidence that the governmental decisions and restrictions themselves are influenced by the historical pathogens.

Arctic Centre University of Lapland Finland

Department of Agriculture Food and Environment University of Catania Italy

Department of Applied Geoinformatics and Spatial Planning Czech University of Life Sciences Prague Germany

Department of Biological Resources National Chiayi University Taiwan

Department of Biology Eberhard Karls University Tuebingen Auf der Morgenstelle 24 72076 Tübingen Germany

Department of Zoology Poznań University of Life Sciences Poland

Graduate Program in Science Education Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul Brazil

Institute for Advanced Study Technical University of Munich Garching Germany

Population Ecology Laboratory Autonomous University of the State of Hidalgo Mexico

TUM School of Life Sciences Ecoclimatology Technical University of Munich Freising Germany

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