Cultural values can influence responses to global crises.

This is well-represented in the sci-fi TV series "Pluribus."

The American protagonist’s reactions can be interpreted within the theory of individualism and collectivism.

Perspective-taking, cooperation, and group dynamics also vary across cultures in the series.

This post is written by Anirudh Tagat and Hansika Kapoor at the Departments of Economics and Psychology, respectively, at Monk Prayogshala, Mumbai, India.

Note: This article contains spoilers for the first season of the Apple TV series, Pluribus.

Pluribus is the Emmy-award-winning drama by Apple TV that is set in a fictional universe where Earth’s inhabitants are infected by an alien RNA virus that unites their consciousness, creating a “hive mind”. In the first season of the show, we follow protagonist Carol Sturka (played by Rhea Seehorn), an American romance novelist, who is told that she and 12 others on Earth are immune to the virus. The plot follows Carol’s trials and tribulations as she grapples with life without her partner (who dies, after being subsumed into the hive mind) and comes to terms with her own role and identity.

For the most part, the show is set in the United States of America, in Carol’s home in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Almost immediately, we see Carol’s approach to the situation through a lens of her being an American citizen: individualistic, concerned only with her well-being, and almost with a personal saviour complex (“I need to save the world”). The show also offers a useful take on modern-day capitalism that is, in large part, a result of such cultural values. For instance, when the hive mind takes over, they organize resources and humans such that there is minimal waste of energy, water, and food. However, they continue to stockpile resources to meet the needs of the immune individuals, who reside in scattered cities around the world. In Carol’s case, she insists that the collective stock her local supermarket completely, so that she can continue her dogged pursuit to live independently, outside the hive.

In terms of cultural values, we can draw on existing theories in cultural psychology and anthropology to better understand how things play out in the show. Of the 13 individuals not part of the hive mind, almost all score more than 0.1 (a maximum score of 0.29 is possible) on the cultural distance measure proposed by Muthukrishna et al. (Figure 1). This combines data from the World Values Survey to present a composite score of how culturally dissimilar two countries can be, based on attitudes, perceptions, and values as recorded in the dataset.

Other countries represented in the immune are largely non-Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (or non-WEIRD). These include Colombia/Paraguay (Manousous Oviedo, a self-storage operator), Peru (Kusimayu, a young girl from a native tribe), Mongolia (no data available, Otgonbayar), China (Xiu Mei, an elderly lady), India (Laxmi, who lives with her family), and Mauritania (Koumba Diabate, a man in search of a lavish lifestyle). Notably, these are the only ones who know English, and can therefore communicate with each other in a shared language. Overall, they are more welcoming of the unification of the globe’s consciousness, actively cooperating with the hive mind. In fact, toward the end of the season, Kusimayu successfully joins the collective.

In fact, a large part of the first season shows how, first, Carol runs through the stages of grief when faced with the death of her partner as well as this post-apocalyptic world, to the point where it affects the well-being of the hive mind. In the second episode (“Pirate Lady”), Carol’s outburst against her liaison, Zosia, leads to the death of nearly 11 million people worldwide (who are part of the hive mind). This captures the “at any cost” type of self-interest that may be more prominent in WEIRD cultures — a willingness to forego collective gains to ensure one’s own self-interest.

Seemingly, even this devastating loss of human lives does not appear to deter Carol from continuing to trigger the hive mind, either with her outbursts or with emotional distress, leading to further loss of lives. This could be related to her inability to take perspectives and see how her actions are leading to her own isolation, as well as that of humanity (that she ironically claims to set out to save). Although there is some evidence to suggest similarities in perspective-taking across cultures, Carol’s egocentric worldview whitewashes such attempts when she refuses to cooperate with “The Others.” It is also interesting to see how Carol is first a part of the global outgroup, as someone immune to the virus, but as the show continues and due to her behaviors, she soon becomes a part of the outgroup within the outgroup via fragmentation.

Given that Pluribus has been renewed for a second season, it will be interesting to see how these cultural differences colour the behaviour of characters in the show. If anything, cross-cultural psychology has much to say on how people across cultures might respond in a dire situation such as the one playing out in Pluribus. The continued presence of the hivemind is likely to also serve as a starting point for studying ingroup and outgroup discrimination.

Gilligan, V. (Executive Producer). (2025–present). Pluribus [TV series]. Apple TV.

© Psychology Today