Behavioral immune tradeoffs: Interpersonal value relaxes social pathogen avoidance

Abstract

Behavioral immune system research has illuminated how people detect and avoid signs of infectious disease. But how do we regulate exposure to pathogens that produce no symptoms in their hosts? This manuscript tests the proposition that estimates of interpersonal value are used for this task. Three studies (N = 1694), each conducted using U.S. samples, are consistent with this proposition: people are less averse to engaging in infection-risky acts not only with friends relative to foes, but also with honest and agreeable strangers relative to dishonest and disagreeable ones. Further, a continuous measure of how much a person values a target covaries with comfort with infection-risky acts with that target, even within relationship categories. Findings indicate that social prophylactic motivations arise not only from cues to infectiousness, but also interpersonal value. Consequently, pathogen transmission within social networks might be exacerbated by relaxed contamination aversions with highly valued social partners.

Disease avoidance motives trade-off against social motives, especially mate-seeking, to predict social distancing: Evidence from the Covid-19 pandemic

“…Recent perspectives on the functioning of the human behavioral immune system have emphasized that pathogen avoidance motives and behavior are the outcome of a trade-off between the costs of pathogen exposure and the costs of avoiding pathogen exposure (Tybur & Lieberman, 2016). Our findings extend this account by emphasizing the importance of mating motives in the tradeoff with pathogen avoidance, and by showing that the trade-off can explain social distancing behavior, in addition to other outputs such as affective responses (Case, Repacholi & Stevenson, 2006) and discomfort with physical contact (Tybur et al, 2020).…”

“…Recent theoretical developments suggest that pathogen avoidance behavior is not only dependent on perceived risk of infection, but on a trade-off between the perceived costs of pathogen exposure and the perceived benefits of social contact (Tybur et al, 2013;Tybur & Liebermann, 2016;Tybur et al, 2020). Therefore, we hypothesize that people's compliance with social distancing can be explained by a trade-off between pathogen avoidance motives and social motives, especially mate-seeking motives.…”

What Role Does Pathogen-Avoidance Psychology Play in Pandemics?

“…Although the behavioral immune system outputs motivations to avoid infection-risky social contact, it relaxes such motivations during some contact rituals (e.g., handshakes) [61] and with targets of high interpersonal value, such as family, friends, and romantic partners [62]. Such targets are as likely to carry infections as strangers, yet people embrace the type of contact with close others that would be aversive with less valued others.…”

Crowd Salience Heightens Tolerance to Healthy Facial Features

“…These restrictive behaviors further include adoption of collectivistic values in regions with heightened pathogen loads (Fincher et al, 2008), greater valuation of conformity within the corresponding countries (Murray, Trudeau, & Schaller, 2011;Wu & Chang, 2012), and interest in authoritarian governance (Murray, Schaller, & Suedfeld, 2013). Both chronic and acute concerns of disease further foster interpersonal reticence (Brown & Sacco, 2016;Mortensen et al, 2010;Tybur et al, 2020), aversion to physical contact with others (Brown & Sacco, 2020;Makhanova & Shepherd, 2020;Sawada, Auger, & Lydon, 2018), and downregulated affiliative motives to reduce the physical contact necessary for disease transmission (Sacco, Young, & Hugenberg, 2014).…”