Pathogens and Immigrants: A Critical Appraisal of the Behavioral Immune System as an Explanation of Prejudice Against Ethnic Outgroups

Abstract

The last two decades have seen the development of a body of literature in evolutionary psychology that seeks to attribute negative attitudes to ethnic and racial minorities and other outgroups to an evolved behavioral immune system (BIS). It hypothesizes that disgust sensitivity, which evolved as protection against pathogen threats, also triggers reactions to cues that are not viscerally disgusting, such as people with unfamiliar features, and thus can explain prejudice toward members of these groups. Such an explanation seems to limit the influence of education, public policy, and rhetoric on those attitudes. Our conceptual analysis shows that this is not the case. Existing hypotheses about why the BIS would be triggered even in the absence of visceral disgust elicitors suggest that general unfamiliarity or atypicality act as cues for this hypersensitive threat detection system. This implies that the impact of the BIS must depend on the cultural and societal context in which people learn not only what is disgusting but also what is typical. The social context of personal interaction with mass media representation of and political debate about immigrants consequently needs to be considered as a decisive factor for any effect of the BIS on attitudes and behavior toward ethnic and racial outgroups. The BIS is therefore not a separate or even superordinate explanation of prejudice, compared to those coming from the social sciences. We conclude that it can offer valuable insights into processes of stigmatization and prejudice, once the role of social learning in the developmental unfolding and activation of psychological mechanisms is taken seriously.

Stigmatization of Chinese and Asian-looking people during the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany

“…However, even the topic on medical measures indicated low levels of stigmatization, although the issue was assessed indirectly by contrasting response patterns. Furthermore, since the cues activating the BIS may be learned in the socio-cultural context (i.e., through media and political discourse), ethnic stereotypes associated with disease may vary across countries [ 41 ]. In addition, due to the sampling method, the study sample is not representative of the German population (e.g., the mean age is younger at 33.37 compared to 44.25 within the general population; [ 42 ]), and illiterate individuals and people without access to the Internet were not able to participate in the study.…”

The Pandemic and the “Perpetual Foreigner”: How Threats Posed by the COVID-19 Pandemic Relate to Stereotyping of Asian Americans

“…Chronic and manipulated pathogen threats have been linked to negative attitudes toward immigrants and people with unfamiliar backgrounds, and they amplify preferences for the (familiar) ingroup over the outgroup (Navarrete and Fessler, 2006;Green et al, 2010;Huang et al, 2011;Wu and Chang, 2012). Fear of uncertain health risks is linked to fear of unfamiliar (or supposedly foreign) others (e.g., Faulkner et al, 2004;Kusche and Barker, 2019; see Neuberg and Schaller, 2016). Thus, it is reasonable to hypothesize that pandemic-related fears will be linked to heightened othering of groups that are already viewed as relatively foreign.…”

Coronavirus Disease 2019–Related Stigma in China: A Descriptive Study

“…To mitigate the threat caused by various diseases, people have evolved the behavior immune system (BIS) (Schaller and Park, 2011 ; Taylor, 2019 ). The activation of the BIS has implications for the affective, cognitive, and behavioral responses of people at individual and group levels, such as devoting more visual attention to cues related to diseases (Ackerman et al, 2009 ; Stone and Potton, 2019 ), increasing intentions to use condoms in sexual attitudes (Tybur et al, 2011 ), producing more prejudices against out-groups (Kusche and Barker, 2019 ), and adopting more socially conservative values (Tybur et al, 2016 ).…”