How online behavior demonstrates psychological conflicts in Emile Durkheim’s collective consciousness of societies highly involved in the COVID-19 pandemic

According to Emile Durkheim’s theory, we can consider societies as having a collective consciousness. To predict the behavior of societies, it is wise to consider the most involved conflicts in their collective consciousness.

We can use online behavior such as Google searches to find an approach to what goes on inside the souls of societies, because when many people search for a term, it means that there is a conflict about that term in the collective consciousness of that society. In this article, during the unprecedented situation that all countries around the globe are confronting due to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, we sought to track the online behavior of nine countries that were seriously involved.

As human conflicts are well categorized in Cloninger’s proposed planes of being, we selected search terms according to this category through conflict tables. Patterns of denial, recalling the Black Death, anxiousness, greed, competition, and tendencies of violence were also seen around the world. In most countries, the major findings/issues at the Spiritual, Intellectual, Emotional, Material and Sexual planes were those concerning “Compassion (Conciliation)”, “Lack of Prudence”, “Lack of Calmness and the Lack of Benevolence”, and “Lack of Charity and Lack of Discretion or Forethought”, respectively.

Awakening each conflict can result in behaviors that concern both societies and government. Predicting these behaviors can help societies take necessary measures and interventions. This especially lends new insights for educational systems in setting policies.