COVID-19 vaccination and the behavioral immune system: The newcomer and the old friend get along in preventing infection

Troisi, Alfonso; Nanni, Roberta Croce; Sanctis, Simone De; Dieguez, Giulia; Carola, Valeria

doi:10.1016/j.bbih.2023.100621

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

References 34 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…While there has been debate regarding whether disgust is synonymous with BIS (Curtis and Biran, 2001;Curtis et al, 2004;Lieberman and Patrick, 2014;Tybur and Lieberman, 2016), the BIS framework has been highly successful in explaining individual-level social cognition and behavior (Mortensen et al, 2010;Schaller et al, 2015;Murray and Schaller, 2016). It has also been applied to understand behavioral responses during the COVID-19 pandemic (Ding et al, 2021;Hromatko et al, 2021;Kempthorne and Terrizzi Jr, 2021;Szymkow et al, 2021;Schaller et al, 2022;Troisi et al, 2023).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Individual Disgust and Collective Anxiety: A Two-Layer Framework of the Behavioral Immune System

Yin,

Zheng,

2024

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly impacted human society and offers a critical backdrop for investigating the Behavioral Immune System (BIS), which traditionally has focused on individual protection mechanisms driven by disgust. This individualistic focus neglects the role of collective behavioral and emotional responses in mitigating disease spread. To address this, we introduce a two-layer framework of the BIS, consisting of an individual layer driven by disgust, primarily manifesting in avoidance behaviors and biased attitudes, and a collective layer fueled by collective anxiety, characterized by isolation from outgroups and self-protection within ingroups. Our model shows that inadequacies in the individual-level BIS stimulate the emergence of a collective-level BIS, which in turn has a buffering effect on individual behaviors. We further explore the impact of social relation attributes on the collective-level BIS, categorizing them into fixed and flowing types based on selectivity and expected endpoints, finding that flowing relations prompt collective BIS responses through cooperation, while fixed relations do so through intimate relationships. This enriched framework offers important implications for public health policies and opens avenues for cross-cultural and cross-societal research by acknowledging the reciprocal influences between individual and collective behaviors in response to pathogen threats.

show abstract