Individualistic and Collective responses to Covid-19 threat: The Greek case

The research aims to explore and understand the recent pandemic crisis in Greece from the perspective of culture. During the last months, Europe faces an unexpected and unprecedented public health crisis. As a response to this ongoing situation, European countries have taken a number of measures to maximize the degree of public safety for their citizens. Many of these measures include a long term physical and social distancing restrictions and rules, self-isolation and mass lock downs. This new status of life affects individuals, communities and societies. Apart from the adopted health protocols for the protection of public health, a critical issue is personal and collective responsibility, self-discipline and obedience to authority’s instructions. To this direction, it is interesting to investigate how culture may influence citizens’ perceptions towards a more individualistic or collective crisis management of this public health threat. Further examination of cultural influence, from the personal level to the macro-social environment, could produce important information for different types of responses during periods of crisis. Values, trends and beliefs are cultural elements influencing political systems. Cultural dynamics include, among others, patterns of individual behaviors and collective memories, able to facilitate individual acceptance or denial, collective consensus or conflict and adaptation or refusal mechanisms. For these reasons cultural dynamics could become more crucial during a period of high uncertainty and environmental threat. These cultural factors affect the political environment by enhancing or delaying specific political decisions and actions. Having in mind that Greece has succeeded, for the time being, to “flatten the curve”, we conduct an online research to the Greek population aiming to explore the individualistic or collective nature of the Greek society. More specifically, we are interested to explore the different ways this nature has affected Greeks on the management of the pandemic in the beginning, during and at the end of quarantine time. Furthermore, we examine the role of technology as a cultural mediator focusing especially on the different ways Greek citizens perceived physical and social distancing followed by strict restrictions on their freedoms.