Body odor disgust sensitivity is associated with prejudice towards a fictive group of immigrants

Zakrzewska, Marta; Olofsson, Jonas; Lindholm, Torun; Blomkvist, Anna; Liuzza, Marco Tullio

doi:10.1016/j.physbeh.2019.01.006

Cited by 36 publications

(29 citation statements)

References 42 publications

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“…In the current preregistered study, we found that disgust sensitivity to body odors (BODS) is related to implicit bias toward an outgroup. This result corroborates and extends previous findings about the relationship between BODS, a BIS-related measure , and attitudes toward outgroups (Zakrzewska et al, 2019). These findings strengthen the view that some individuals may have a more sensitive BIS which makes them prefer behaviors and attitudes that limit contact with out-groups.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 90%

“…As compared to those other assessments, BODS is more strongly correlated with perceived vulnerability to disease (PVD, Duncan et al, 2009), a result that supports the notion that body odor perception might be more relevant in detecting pathogen cues and activating the appropriate behavioral response . Higher disgust sensitivity to body odors has been related to higher explicit bias toward a fictive refugee group (Zakrzewska et al, 2019) showing that individual differences in BODS levels are interesting in the context of prejudice.…”

Section: The Role Of Olfaction and Body Odors In Avoiding Diseasementioning

confidence: 99%

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An Overprotective Nose? Implicit Bias Is Positively Related to Individual Differences in Body Odor Disgust Sensitivity

et al. 2020

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Body odors are universal elicitors of disgust, a core emotion that plays a key role in the behavioral immune system (BIS) -a set of psychological functions working to avoid disease. Recent studies showed that body odor disgust sensitivity (BODS) is associated with explicit xenophobia and authoritarianism. In the current experimental pre-registered study (https://osf.io/6jkp2/), we investigated the association between olfactory pathogen cues, BODS and implicit bias toward an outgroup (tested by an implicit association test). Results show that BODS is positively related to implicit bias toward an outgroup, suggesting that social attitudes may be linked to basic chemosensory processes. These attitudes were not influenced by background odors. Additionally, BODS was related to social, but not economic conservatism. This study extends the BIS framework to an experimental context by focusing on the role of disgust and body odors in shaping implicit bias.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 90%

Section: The Role Of Olfaction and Body Odors In Avoiding Diseasementioning

confidence: 99%

An Overprotective Nose? Implicit Bias Is Positively Related to Individual Differences in Body Odor Disgust Sensitivity

et al. 2020

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“…Previous studies on ingroup favoritism mainly support the theory that ingroup favoritism is an adaptive response from the behavioral immune system (Fincher and Thornhill, 2008a,b, 2012a,b; Van Vugt and Park, 2009; Schaller and Murray, 2010; Neuberg et al, 2011; Schaller and Neuberg, 2012; Thornhill and Fincher, 2014; Schaller et al, 2015; Murray and Schaller, 2016; Neuberg and Schaller, 2016; Ji et al, 2019; Zakrzewska et al, 2019). However, some recent studies have also found that the negativities toward outgroups may not be an adaptive outcome but a byproduct of the behavioral immune system.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 93%

“…Researchers proposed that, since the physiological immune system of an organism is primarily shaped by the local pathogen ecology, the outgroup members may often harbor the novel pathogens that are infectious to an individual and its immunologically similar ingroup members (Fincher and Thornhill, 2008a,b, 2012a,b; Schaller and Murray, 2010; Thornhill and Fincher, 2014). Therefore, under ecological conditions of high disease stress, a psychological mechanism facilitating the aggregation of ingroup members but inhibiting contacts with outgroup members is adaptive for its functional value of avoiding novel pathogens and minimizing local infectious risks and thus should be favored by natural selection 1 (Fincher and Thornhill, 2008a,b, 2012a,b; Van Vugt and Park, 2009; Schaller and Murray, 2010; Neuberg et al, 2011; Schaller and Neuberg, 2012; Thornhill and Fincher, 2014; Schaller et al, 2015; Murray and Schaller, 2016; Neuberg and Schaller, 2016; Ji et al, 2019; Zakrzewska et al, 2019).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Disease Threat and the Functional Flexibility of Ingroup Derogation

Yang

Zhou

2019

Front. Psychol.

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While the findings from previous studies directly relate the ingroup derogation phenomenon to the evolved response of the behavioral immune system, there are three major limitations in the previous studies on the functional flexibility of ingroup derogation. The present study further investigated the functional flexibility of ingroup derogation by conducting three behavioral experiments on Chinese participants. In Experiment 1, we tested whether exposing to situational disease primes leads to an exaggerated ingroup derogation attitude by adopting a more rigorous control. In Experiment 2, we manipulated the source of disease threats to test whether the ingroup derogation mechanism adjusts its response according to the specific perceived vulnerabilities to the disease threats posed by ingroup and outgroup members. In Experiment 3, we tested whether recent illness promotes the expression of ingroup derogation attitudes. Results of the three experiments consistently showed that, the Chinese participants adjusted their ingroup derogation attitudes according to the external environmental disease cues (Experiments 1 and 2) and the internal physiological disease cues (Experiment 3). The results also showed that the ingroup derogation mechanism was sensitive to the specific perceived vulnerabilities to the ingroup disease threat and the outgroup disease threat (Experiment 2). Taken together, these results support the evolutionary hypothesis of ingroup derogation and suggest that the ingroup derogation found in East Asian cultures could be accounted by a functionally flexible disease-avoidance mechanism.

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“…To date, there is a large body of empirical data demonstrating the crucial role of disgust and disgust sensitivity in shaping social attitudes and behaviors. Disgust facilitates out-group dehumanization (Buckels and Trapnell, 2013) and xenophobia (Zakrzewska et al, 2019), as well as prejudicial reactions to individuals not being actually diseased but only heuristically associated with the presence of diseases (e.g., obese or disfigured people; Harvey et al, 2002). It has recently been suggested that the behavioral immune system uses out-group membership as a cue for infectiousness (Bressan, 2020).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Testing the Disgust-Based Mechanism of Homonegative Attitudes in the Context of the COVID-19 Pandemic

2021

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Negative attitudes and stigmatization can originate from the perception of a disease-related threat. Following the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is often suggested that incidents of discriminatory behavior are the result of defense mechanisms aimed at avoiding pathogens. According to the behavioral immune system theory, people are motivated to distance themselves from individuals who show signs of infection, or who are only heuristically associated with a disease, primarily because of the disgust they evoke. In this paper we focus on negative attitudes toward gay men and lesbians who are among social groups that have been persistently framed as “unclean.” In our correlational study (N = 500 heterosexual participants; Polish sample data collected during the first COVID-19 lockdown in Poland, in March/April 2020) we tested moderation models derived from the behavioral immune system theory. Specifically, we investigated whether perceived vulnerability to disease and perceived threat of contracting COVID-19 moderate the relation between disgust and homonegativity. We found that sexual disgust (but not pathogen nor moral disgust) predicted homonegative attitudes. This effect was stronger for participants expressing higher levels of perceived vulnerability to disease but was not dependent on the perception of the COVID-19 threat. The results reaffirm previous evidence indicating a pivotal role of disgust in disease-avoidance mechanisms. They also point to functional flexibility of the behavioral immune system by demonstrating the moderating role of perceived vulnerability to disease in shaping homonegative attitudes. Finally, they show that the threat of COVID-19 does not strengthen the relationship between disgust and homonegativity.

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Body odor disgust sensitivity is associated with prejudice towards a fictive group of immigrants

Cited by 36 publications

References 42 publications

An Overprotective Nose? Implicit Bias Is Positively Related to Individual Differences in Body Odor Disgust Sensitivity

An Overprotective Nose? Implicit Bias Is Positively Related to Individual Differences in Body Odor Disgust Sensitivity

Disease Threat and the Functional Flexibility of Ingroup Derogation

Testing the Disgust-Based Mechanism of Homonegative Attitudes in the Context of the COVID-19 Pandemic

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