Using psychological science to support social distancing: Tradeoffs between affiliation and disease‐avoidance motivations

Abstract

Humans are an intensely social species with a pervasive need for affiliation and social interaction. However, satisfying this fundamental motive comes with risk, including increased exposure to others' communicable pathogens. Consequently, disease mitigation strategies may require humans to downregulate their interest in socialization when pathogenic threat is elevated. Subsequent unsatisfactorily met affiliation needs can result in downregulation of disease avoidance goals in the service of social inclusion, albeit at the cost of putting individuals at greater risk for pathogen exposure. The current review summarizes past work in social and evolutionary psychology demonstrating affiliation and disease‐avoidance motivation tradeoffs. We then apply this research by articulating strategies to support and maintain social distancing behaviors in the face of loneliness, which is of particular importance during pandemic outbreaks such as COVID‐19. Finally, we propose novel and integrative research questions related to affiliation/pathogen‐avoidance tradeoffs.

Who likes extraverts? Re-examining motivational tradeoff effects in social perception

“…As extraverted individuals are more open to not only social, but also sexual relationships (Nettle, 2005), they may seem more approachable to people with an unrestricted sociosexual orientation. Together, these findings not only extend the idea of motivational tradeoffs to the domain of social perception (Sacco & Brown, 2018b;Young et al, 2021), they also provide evidence for the importance of the interaction between perceiver characteristics (e.g., pathogen concern) and target characteristics (e.g., perceived extraversion) for explaining how first impressions arise (Hehman et al, 2019).…”

Women Suffered More Emotional and Life Distress than Men during the COVID-19 Pandemic: The Role of Pathogen Disgust Sensitivity

“…This result is particularly important because it highlights that COVID-19 disproportionately affects women partly because of psychological motivations; women have greater disease-avoidance motivations, which contributes to their psychological distress response to the COVID-19 pandemic. We should note, however, evidence suggests that disease-avoidance motivations (e.g., disgust sensitivity) were also associated with fewer infectious illnesses [39] and greater health-protective behavior, such as social distancing and mask-wearing [40]. Thus, this might indicate the double-edged sword of pathogen disgust sensitivity in human health and help to explain why women are at decreased risk of fatality and death with the COVID-19 disease than men at the psychological level.…”

Crowd Salience Heightens Tolerance to Healthy Facial Features

“…Nonetheless, it remains crucial to remember that the psychological responses to a pandemic may not necessarily be the same as the responses toward proximal disease cues to which humans evolved, given the historical recency of pandemics for the species (Ackerman, Tybur, & Blackwell, 2021 ). Potential ambiguities from the pandemic necessitate future research to clarify regional effect, which could inform policies to leverage the interplay between affiliative and disease avoidance motives in shaping adherence to public health guidelines (Young, Brown, & Sacco, 2021 ).…”