Outbreaks and Outgroups: Three Tests of the Relationship Between Disease Avoidance Motives and Xenophobia During an Emerging Pandemic

Abstract

Given the persistent threat posed by infectious disease throughout human history, people have a sophisticated suite of cognitive and behavioral strategies designed to mitigate exposure to disease vectors. Previous research suggests that one such strategy is avoidance of unfamiliar outgroup members. We thus examined the relationship between dispositional worry about disease and support for COVID-19-related travel bans across three preregistered studies ( N = 764) conducted at the outset of the pandemic in the United States and Singapore. Americans higher in Perceived Infectability were more supportive of travel bans, whereas Singaporeans higher in Germ Aversion were more supportive of travel bans. In Study 2 , priming saliency of the pandemic increased support for travel bans from high (but not low) pandemic-risk countries. This prime did not increase general xenophobia. These results are consistent with threat-specific perspectives of outgroup avoidance, and provide an ecologically-valid test of the implications of perceived disease threat for policy-related attitudes and decision-making. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s40806-021-00283-z.

Parasites and promiscuity: Acute disease salience leads to more restricted sexual attitudes

“…One constellation of phenomena influenced by disease threat pertains to aversions to social risk-taking and disinclinations toward novelty. Both trait-like worry about disease threat and experimental manipulations of disease threat predict higher levels of xenophobia, greater conformity to social norms, more social withdrawal, harsher moral judgment, greater social conservatism, and greater risk aversion (e.g., Duncan et al, 2009;Faulkner et al, 2004;Moran et al, 2021;Mortensen et al, 2010;Murray & Schaller, 2012;Prokosch et al, 2019;Terrizzi et al, 2013;Wu & Chang, 2012). This set of results from laboratory investigations is also conceptually replicated at the cross-cultural level of analysis (see Murray & Schaller, 2014, for review): Countries or societies that have faced historically higher levels of disease have cultural norms dictating more prophylactic behaviors, such as lower levels of social gregariousness, higher levels of conformity, more distinct ingroup/outgroup boundaries, more emphasis on "binding" moral foundations, and more restrictions on civil liberties (Fincher et al, 2008;Murray et al, 2011Murray et al, , 2013Murray & Schaller, 2017;Tybur et al, 2016;van Leeuwen et al, 2012).…”

Crowd Salience Heightens Tolerance to Healthy Facial Features

“…Crowd salience should heighten preferences for faces not exhibiting disease cues. Though not putatively associated with infection risk, it could additionally be possible that heuristic associations between disease and foreign individuals could similarly heighten aversion to members of specific outgroups (e.g., Brown, Sacco, & Medlin, 2019d;Moran et al, 2021;Navarrete & Fessler, 2006). Future research could render crowding salient before tasking participants with evaluating targets from various ingroup or outgroup categories (i.e., foreign versus domestic individuals) while assessing the degree targets appear pathogenically threatening.…”

Heightened religiosity proactively and reactively responds to the COVID-19 pandemic across the globe: Novel insights from the parasite-stress theory of sociality and the behavioral immune system theory

“…For example, whether valuing strong family ties, which is another extended element of in-group assortative sociality ( Fincher & Thornhill, 2012 ), would also reactively and proactively respond to COVID-19 at worldwide level remains unknown. Lastly, individual-level research could be conducted to test whether exposure to COVID-19 cues ( Chan and Saqib, 2021 , Karwowski et al, 2020 , Moran et al, 2021 , Sorokowski et al, 2020 ) could increase intrinsic religiosity and promote religious behaviors, which could further support the BIS reactive role of heightened religiosity.…”

“…Recent social and cross-cultural psychological studies on Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) show that features of in-group assortative sociality (e.g., xenophobia) were responsive to the COVID-19 pandemic ( Chan and Saqib, 2021 , Karwowski et al, 2020 , Moran et al, 2021 , Sorokowski et al, 2020 ). Meanwhile, regions valuing strong in-group assortative sociality (e.g., collectivism) had better control of the novel coronavirus ( Canatay et al, 2021 , Gokmen et al, 2021 , Liu, 2021 , Maaravi et al, 2021 , Rajkumar, 2021 ).…”