I see sick people: Beliefs about sensory detection of infectious disease are largely consistent across cultures

2025/04/22 by Joshua M. Ackerman, Theodore Samore, Daniel M.T. Fessler +139 · 1 voice
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Medicine · Neuroscience · #Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment #Yersinia bacterium, plague, ectoparasites research #Zoonotic diseases and public health

paper · doi:10.1016/j.bbi.2025.04.020

openalex publication_date 2025/04/22 · crossref created 2025/04/22 · crossref issued 2025/08/01 · crossref published 2025/08/01 · crossref published-print 2025/08/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · crossref deposited 2025/11/18 · crossref indexed 2026/03/01 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Citations

• Concepts and Folk Theories
• Preferred Interpersonal Distances: A Global Comparison
• Behavioral and physiological sensitivity to natural sick faces
• Neighbours and relatives: accounting for spatial distribution when testing causal hypotheses in cultural evolution

Discussions

• Many psychological mechanisms that help us detect & avoid disease have been observed in people from very different cultures. Here's another study that found strong similarities in people's beliefs a [bsky, 2 points, 0 comments]