2011/01/03 by Valérie Curtis, Mícheál de Barra, Robert Aunger · 754 citations
Neuroscience · Psychology · Medicine · #Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment #Cultural Differences and Values #Disgust #Psychology #Social psychology #Disease #Behavioural sciences #Situational ethics #Developmental psychology #Cognitive psychology #Medicine #Psychotherapist
paper · pdf · doi:10.1098/rstb.2010.0117
published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences 366(1563), 389-401 (Royal Society)
openalex publication_date 2011/01/03 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
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.