behavioralimmunityfordummie-blog

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Behavioral Immune System

The psychological processes that infer infection risk from perceptual cues, and that respond to these perceptual cues through the activation of aversive emotions, cognitions and behavioral impulses.

-National Institutes of Health: US National Library of Medicine

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Disgust

Marked aversion aroused by something highly distasteful.

-Merriam-Webster Dictionary

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One helpful resource on understanding disgust and its place in humanity from an evolutionary perspective was the podcast “How Disgust Works,” by Stuff You Should Know7. It gave no insight on its role within behavioral immunity, and some of its conclusions I disagree with, but overall it really gave great information on the co-evolution of disgust alongside agriculture, innovation, urbanization, and industrialization.

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Introduction

The interactions between doctors and patients is complex, drawing from many different fields, ideologies, and models within sociology. Doctors have their perspective, goals, and plans and patients have theirs. But what has not been discussed so far during this course is the effect that the physical condition of the patient has on how healthcare providers act. The emotion of disgust is the physical reaction of the healthy individual toward a person or object that does not meet the “correct” condition that is in their head. Having such a broad definition allows for some pretty strange subgroups of disgust like moral disgust, that can fit things like racism and political beliefs under its definition. Fortunately I wont be exploring that realm of the definition, but rather, I will deal with the more healthcare-oriented interpretation dealing with visible illness, poor hygiene, and abnormal appearance.

The act of being disgusted is actually beneficial for ones health as it reduces exposure to pathogens via avoidance behaviors. Germ theory is a very new concept from the last couple centuries, but it doesn’t take a modern scientist to realize that if your friend eats rotting meat and then gets violently ill and dies, it is probably best to avoid rotten food. Not only that, many animals avoid certain triggers of their own form of behavioral immunity. This topic is a great crossroad of sociology and biology because just as psychology has learned in recent years, every trait has evolved from something to what it is now for a reason.

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Thesis

If behavioral immunity operates in the way that science has come to observe, then can health care workers, i.e. those who ignore their behavioral immune response daily, be characterized as exhibiting deviant behavior.

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The results suggest that pathogen cues influence behavioral immune system‐sensitive individuals' willingness to provide humanitarian aid when there is a risk of contamination to in‐group members

Money for microbes—Pathogen avoidance and out‐group helping behaviour.2

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The results indicated that mere social categorization alone — a heuristic cue that implies the differentiation between "us" and "them" — was sufficient to elicit ingroup derogation

Behavioral Immune System and Ingroup Derogation: The Effects of Infectious Diseases on Ingroup Derogation Attitudes.6

The possible reasons for this observation was discussed in the study as primarily for mating purposes and incorporating new genetic material and immunities into the ingroup community. 

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Clearly, research2,6 is unclear on whether or not it is better to be “in-group” or “out-group.” But doctors must treat every sick person, and they do. Doctors are generally well-payed and highly educated, which means that when contrasted to their patients, they are not in the “in-group.” So something has to be going on that allows for medical professionals to be so willing to help the “out-group” patients. 

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What’s going on in their heads?

A recent study5 from 2018 tested the three possible variables on what causes some people to have a more intense disgust response than others. They looked at mental health, specifically anxiety and emotional distress, they looked at how they were raised, and they looked at the environmental risk of parasitic infection. They did no experimentation themselves, but they collected and analyzed dozens of studies and aggregated them into a coherent paper. Unfortunately...

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We conclude that none of these hypotheses is supported by existing data

Why do people vary in disgust?5

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Greater disease-avoidance traits were associated with greater neuroticism/emotionality (r = 0.19) and conscientiousness (r = 0.08), as well as lower openness to experience (r = −0.11) and extraversion (r = −0.04).

Disease avoidance and personality: A meta-analysis.3

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A meta-analysis from 20183 supported that there was no mental health correlation for behavioral immunity, but it did show a small correlation of extraversion to low behavioral immune response. Could that mean that friendly people are more likely to be doctors? 

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An article8 from Pulse magazine would disagree with that idea in their article, “Could personality tests help us select happier doctors.” In it they describe that while extravert doctors are more effective and happy over time, it is not generally a metric by which someone chooses to become a doctor. 

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Higher burnout scores in middle age were significantly correlated with earlier evidence of low self-esteem, feelings of inadequacy, dysphoria and obsessive worry, passivity, social anxiety, and withdrawal from others...Clearly, the personality traits of high conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and openness to experience are desirable in a doctor

Could personality tests help us select happier doctors.8

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There is clearly not a very strong link to personality traits and the intensity of individual behavioral immune response. 

Screenshot courtesy of faculty.washington.edu/ddbrewer/s231/s231regr.htm

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Xenophobic and conformist attitudes may not only prove costly to individuals' own health outcomes, but may have negative population-wide health implications too.

Implications of the behavioural immune system for social behaviour and human health in the modern world.1

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This article1 goes over the social implications of behavioral immunity outside of the healthcare field. It traces antisocial behavior’s and xenophobia’s roots to behavioral immunity. Its starts to hint that only calculating disgust into behavioral immunity does not give an accurate representation of how the world, and the people within, really is.