Disgust as an adaptive system for disease avoidance behaviour

By V. Curtis, Mícheál de Barra, Robert Aunger. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2011

671 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Disgust is an evolved psychological system for protecting organisms from infection through disease avoidant behaviour. This ‘behavioural immune system’, present in a diverse array of species, exhibits universal features that orchestrate hygienic behaviour in response to cues of risk of contact with pathogens. However, disgust is also a dynamic adaptive system. Individuals show variation in pathogen avoidance associated with psychological traits like having a neurotic personality, as well as a consequence of being in certain physiological states such as pregnancy or infancy. Three specialized learning mechanisms modify the disgust response: the Garcia effect, evaluative conditioning and the law of contagion. Hygiene behaviour is influenced at the group level through social learning heuristics such as ‘copy the frequent’. Finally, group hygiene is extended symbolically to cultural rules about purity and pollution, which create social separations and are enforced as manners. Cooperative hygiene endeavours such as sanitation also reduce pathogen prevalence. Our model allows us to integrate perspectives from psychology, ecology and cultural evolution with those of epidemiology and anthropology. Understanding the nature of disease avoidance psychology at all levels of human organization can inform the design of programmes to improve public health.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/eddaa029d5a913dcd131ecf6e5b62d7e7c76d66c

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Cognitive Neuroscience

1. David M. Buss
2. Laith Al-Shawaf
3. Robert Aunger
4. David M. G. Lewis
5. V. Curtis
6. Mark Schaller
7. Daniel M.T. Fessler

In Social Psychology

1. Robert Aunger
2. Laith Al-Shawaf
3. David M. Buss
4. V. Curtis
5. David M. G. Lewis

Citations in the corpus

• The Anatomy of Motivation: An Evolutionary-Ecological Approach (2013, background): “So, for example, in this scheme, disgust is the motive that drives parasite avoidance behavior; however, it is also the name of the associated feeling (Curtis et al. 2011).”
• Sex Differences in Disgust: Why Are Women More Easily Disgusted Than Men? (2018, background): “To paraphrase a prominent disgust researcher, ancestral women had to be disgusted for two (Curtis et al., 2011).”