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Cited by 746Psychology of Moral and Emotional JudgmentEvolutionary Psychology and Human BehaviorDeath Anxiety and Social Exclusion

Disgust as an adaptive system for disease avoidance behaviour

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Curtis, Valerie, de Barra, Mícheál, Aunger, Robert·2011·Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
DOI 10.1098/rstb.2010.0117PMC PMC3013466
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Abstract

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.

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  • When the Inbar et al. study is combined with the general literature on the functional design of disgust for pathogen avoidance, the hypothesis that disgust will be greater in conservatives (collectivists) than in liberals (individualists) remains viable.

    “When the Inbar et al. study is combined with the general literature on the functional design of disgust for pathogen avoidance (Curtis et al. 2011; Oaten et al. 2009), the hypothesis that disgust will be greater in conservatives (collectivists) than in liberals (individualists) remains viable.”

    From Parasite-stress promotes in-group assortative sociality: The cases of strong family ties and heightened religiosity (2012) · cites this paper as Curtis et al. 2011

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Authors
Curtis, V., de Barra, M., & Aunger, R.
Affiliations
  • London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (GB)
  • The Hygiene Centre, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, London WC1E 7HT, UK
Corresponding author
Curtis, Valerie
ORCID
Venue
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
Publisher
The Royal Society
Published
2011-02-12
Volume
366
Issue
1563
Pages
389-401
ISSN
  • 0962-8436 (ISSN-L)
  • 1471-2970
DOI
10.1098/rstb.2010.0117
PMC
PMC3013466
OpenAlex
W2138011226
Cited by
746
References
10
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FWCI
14.62
Type
journal article
Language
en
Update notices
correction (2011-04-27)
Open access
Licence
royalsociety.org/journals/ethics-policies/data-sharing-mining/ (tdm)
Locations
  • Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
  • LSHTM Research Online (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine) (acceptedVersion)
Funders
  • London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
  • Economic and Social Research Council
Topics
  • Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Death Anxiety and Social Exclusion
Keywords
disgust, behavioural immune system, disease avoidance, pathogen avoidance, hygiene practices, evaluative conditioning, social learning, purity and pollution, sanitation, cultural evolution
MeSH terms
Attitude to Health, Communicable Diseases, Emotions, Humans, Hygiene, Models, Theoretical, Public Health, Social Behavior

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

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