The smoke-detector principle of pathogen avoidance: A test of how the behavioral immune system gives rise to prejudice. Stage 1 Registered Report.

Florian van Leeuwen*, Bastian Jaeger, John Axelsson, D. Vaughn Becker, Lisa Hansson, Julie Lasselin, Mats Lekander, Joshua M. Tybur, Matti Vuorre

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleScientificpeer-review

Abstract

Motivations to avoid infectious disease seem to influence prejudice toward some groups, including groups not explicitly associated with infectious disease. The standard explanation relies on signal detection theory and proposes that pathogen detection should be biased toward making many false alarms (false positives) and few misses (false negatives). Therefore, pathogen detection mechanisms arguably categorize a broad array of atypical features as indicative of infection, which gives rise to negative affect toward people with atypical features. We will test a key hypothesis derived from this explanation: specific appearance-based prejudices are associated with tendencies to make false alarms when estimating the presence of infectious disease. While this hypothesis is implicit in much work on the behavioral immune system and prejudice, direct tests of it are lacking and existing relevant work contains important limitations. We will conduct a cross-sectional study with a large US sample that includes measures of tendencies to make false alarms and prejudice toward multiple relevant social groups/categories.
Original languageEnglish
Number of pages32
JournalPsyArxiv Preprints
DOIs
Publication statusE-pub ahead of print - 2024

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