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Episode 26: COVID-19 and the Behavioral Immune System: Joshua Ackerman
16 Plays4 years ago
Season 2 premiere!
How do people behave in a pandemic? Joshua Ackerman of the University of Michigan talks about how we alter our behavior in the face of pathogens. A repertoire of responses (such as avoidance) referred to as the "behavioral immune system" is a way for humans to avoid pathogens BEFORE our biochemical immune system encounters them. A pandemic such as COVID-19 may trigger this behavioral immune system, but using far different information than our evolutionary ancestors ever had.
Joshua Ackerman's research page at Michigan
Special Guest: Joshua Ackerman.
Transcript
Introduction to Episode and Guest
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to Cognition. I'm your host, Rolf Nelson. And I'm Joe Hardy.
00:00:06
Speaker
On today's episode, we speak with Professor Josh Ackerman from the University of Michigan about the behavioral immune system, which is the set of behaviors and cognitions that we engage in when we perceive to be under threat by a disease. And I think this is a particularly relevant conversation given that we're in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. We hope that this is helpful for you and we'd love your feedback and enjoy the show.
00:00:45
Speaker
Welcome to Cog Nation. Joining us today is Professor Joshua Ackerman, who's an associate professor of psychology and an associate professor of marketing at the University of Michigan. Josh studies social psychology, threat perception, evolutionary psychology, and especially relevant to things that are going on in the world today, he studies the behavioral immune system.
00:01:09
Speaker
So how it is that we respond to threats, immune threats in a behavioral way. Josh, thanks a lot for joining us here today and thinking about what's going on behaviorally during this COVID-19 outbreak. Yeah, thanks for having me. I think it will be a very topical discussion.
COVID-19 Responses in Michigan and California
00:01:29
Speaker
Yeah, so a lot going on in the world today. So how are things at Michigan right now? So in Rhode Island, it's all weird everywhere, I think. This is a very strange time. We've been staying at home. We're in day eight of quarantine. And we don't have a good sense of what's going on in other parts of the country. So how does it feel in Michigan?
00:01:54
Speaker
Probably about the same as it is everywhere. Lots of confusion, lots of solitude, I guess. Like you said, it's a really...
00:02:06
Speaker
odd time to be living in. So we, in Ann Arbor anyway, we have got to the point where we've shut down all of the restaurants and bars and so forth, except for takeout and delivery. So I think we're all waiting for the next impending shift towards the sort of mandatory home isolation kind of process that's happening in some of the other states.
00:02:36
Speaker
I guess everybody is switching to online courses. We're still finishing up spring break, so I'll be starting teaching online courses soon. Have you started doing that? Yeah. The whole university has switched to online courses. Pretty much everything, except for maybe some essential processes, are shut down. So research is shut down. Classes are online.
00:02:59
Speaker
It's been really interesting learning about all the all the tools, I guess, that are available to teach online. But it's it's definitely been a learning as you go kind of process, both for, I think, all of the instructors and for the students who are at this point actually probably spread around the world, actually. Right. Yeah. In California here, I'm in El Cerrito, California, which is close to Berkeley.
00:03:29
Speaker
And the Bay area was one of the first areas in the country to really Institute what was first called a shelter in place. Um, you know, I don't know if it was necessarily what you would call it a mandate, but it was a shelter in place order, I guess. And now they're rebranding it. We're calling it a stay at home, a stay at home order, which is now statewide throughout California. And.
00:04:00
Speaker
So right, so everyone's going just only out to get takeout or go to the grocery store, but also people going for walks. So a lot of people going for walks in the neighborhood, more people walking, I think, than I've ever seen before. So that's kind of interesting. Yeah, I'm seeing the same thing here. It's an amazing number of people actually outside, which is both,
00:04:28
Speaker
sort of very interesting to see, but also almost feels as though you're in a slightly crowded environment if you're just walking down the sidewalk. Right. I get that too. I mean, even at the park, I'm sort of like, you know, we're a little close here, guys. Right. And there's this awareness, there's this general awareness that people shouldn't be within six feet of each other. So there's kind of, you know, you're looking at people and judging, wait, are they too close?
00:04:57
Speaker
Yes, if only everyone had really internalized that message. I'm not so sure that's the case. Yeah, right. I think at this point, it seems to be that some people are hyper aware and some people are certainly less aware and it takes a while for that idea to spread across the population. I mean, this leads directly into your area of research. So you talk about what's called the behavioral immune system. So what is the behavioral immune system?
What is the Behavioral Immune System?
00:05:28
Speaker
Yeah, the behavioral immune system is sort of a, it's an idea. And it's an idea that links together a number of different aspects of psychology that revolve around this idea of how people manage the danger, the risks, the threat of infectious disease. And so it's in a sense that the idea is an analog to the physiological immune system. So, you know, we have these
00:05:55
Speaker
Really complex set of internal processes that are involved to manage the various agents that infect our body but the.
00:06:06
Speaker
sort of risk and the downside that comes along with that internal system is that it by and large requires people to become infected in the first place, right? So the agents have to enter the body before the body can respond. So the idea of the behavioral immune system is that there are these various kinds of thoughts and emotions and behaviors that all work together to essentially down-regulate the risk of that initial infection. So preventing people from
00:06:36
Speaker
becoming infected in the first place. So all sorts of different kinds of responses that are biased to essentially keep people away from features of other people and features of environments that have historically been linked to or resemble cues to infectious disease.
00:06:58
Speaker
So we're getting an idea of how such a system might be triggered. Have you noticed anything in, I guess, in the way that people are responding to COVID-19 that fits with the literature in what you might have expected?
00:07:19
Speaker
Yeah, I think to a certain degree. I mean, I think we're in kind of a very unique time. I mean, it's certainly been the case that people have faced epidemics before. But the sort of range of epidemics and pandemics, the amount of people involved is still a relatively, I think, modern phenomenon. By modern, I mean probably since people have started really grouping together in large numbers since the agricultural revolution.
00:07:47
Speaker
So we have this, the behavioral immune system is much older. So the idea is that infectious disease has been one of these
00:07:57
Speaker
real dangers for humans across their history. In fact, some people say it's the biggest killer of humans in our species history. And so people have all these ways of thinking about and responding to these cues of others and environments that involve disease. But when it comes to epidemics that are these really widespread and uncertain kinds of situations, then
Avoidance Behaviors and Prejudice During COVID-19
00:08:21
Speaker
sometimes you're going to, I think, see responses that fit this kind of behavioral immune system idea. And other times, it's sort of more like haywire responses. So I think in terms of what I've seen so far, I mean, the common one is just avoidance. So people are anxious. They're fearful. So far, I don't know that we've seen, at least in the US, enough individual situations where people might also respond with emotions like disgust.
00:08:50
Speaker
But, but that is a common one associated with these responses but it's just generally that people are becoming much more avoidant of others of situations where people might have interacted with things before so you know weariness about touching surfaces and so forth.
00:09:08
Speaker
And there's even been, I think, I'm not sure I'm seeing as much of it anymore, but during the initial stages of the outbreak in the US anyway, there was this heightened sense, at least there was these news reports, of increased prejudicial responses.
00:09:25
Speaker
towards groups associated with the threat, so increased stereotyping and prejudice towards Asian Americans and Asians from other countries. And that idea fits with a lot of the literature in the behavioral immune system world, which suggests that people become very wary about people who aren't like them.
00:09:47
Speaker
So it's sort of like your closing ranks, you're trying to seal off any external forces that you can and stick with your in-group and push away any out-groups that might be invaders, sort of as though the disease is invading you.
00:10:05
Speaker
Exactly. I mean, there's a couple of things that happen. So people construct these stronger walls between groups, but they also become much more sensitive to not just what the other group is doing, but what people in their own group are doing. So there's a reasonable amount of evidence, I think, that people who are really concerned about disease become very aware of and they tend to track
00:10:30
Speaker
social norm behavior within their group. So they pay a lot of attention to people who are violating social norms and they show increased desire to punish those people. And the basic idea is, right, so if you are in a group that is functioning, you know, well enough, then anybody who's doing something different might be putting that group at risk, right? So it might be doing some sort of behavior that could lead to infection spreading within the group. So you need to pay a lot of attention to what people are doing.
00:11:00
Speaker
So you're trying to decrease risk for other members of your group? Yeah, I mean, it's effectively decreasing risk for yourself, but by proxy, you're doing that for other members of your group as well. So if we're reliant on other people, then what other people are doing really matters for us. And so any of these behaviors is really designed to
00:11:22
Speaker
decrease risk, which doesn't mean that it's always going to have that actual outcome. So people have a really difficult time tracking who's actually infected or where the risk really resides. I mean, these pathogens that people are trying to manage are invisible, essentially. And so the kinds of responses people have show a large degree of bias and less so accuracy.
00:11:48
Speaker
From an evolutionary perspective, like you say, if this kind of suite of responses came from a time in which we're seeing no more than 100 or so individuals during your entire life, then how is it that we can take in information about the kind of society that we live in right now with hundreds of millions of people
00:12:13
Speaker
giving us input into how we should be behaving. We're getting less personal direct information. So how does this affect the way that a behavioral immune system might work or how it might misfire sometimes?
00:12:27
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, that's a great question. I think that we're still in the process of trying to understand that. I mean, where people are getting these pieces of information from others that might represent what's going on in their local community, but often it's really relevant to other parts of the country, other parts of the world. And so I think an open question is whether people are treating those pieces of information as though they're actually relevant to their local community
00:12:55
Speaker
even though they might not represent what's going on around them. So I think that in this particular case of these kinds of epidemics, where we're still, at least in the US, we're still sort of in the phase of
00:13:14
Speaker
danger awareness without seeing the actual in-person effects of that danger. So although the number of cases is really increasing, most people don't know anybody who is at least showing symptoms of infection. And so they're not getting those really salient cues to infection. I think once that becomes more common, we're gonna see many more behaviors that are more characteristic of the sort of classic research in behavioral immune system work.
00:13:43
Speaker
But right now, people are, I think, really responding with fear and anxiety. And I think a lot of that just comes from the idea that, I mean, we're essentially trained to understand that infection threats can't exist.
00:13:58
Speaker
And so we're told that those how those work. So we have a sort of some knowledge about the process of how infection works and how pathogen spread. And so we learn that, you know, across our lifespan. And now we're sort of sensitized to this idea that the news is going to tell us what's the threat or other people are going to tell us what's that threat.
00:14:19
Speaker
Instead of having those more sensory cues to infection, we just have that information. And I think that information opens up a wide range of possible responses, some things that we wouldn't have historically have seen
Attractiveness and Disease Threat Perception
00:14:33
Speaker
before people had a better concept of things like germ theory.
00:14:39
Speaker
Yeah, that's interesting. In the research, there are a number of different cues that people talk about as things that the behavioral immune system has evolved to use almost as proxies for
00:14:57
Speaker
potential disease threat. Some of them are things that are plausibly related to real threats and some of them are more just stereotypy. Can you talk a little bit about that?
00:15:12
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, this idea resides in this fact that it's very difficult to truly detect disease or infectious disease in the world, right? So the agents themselves are essentially invisible. The various vectors that transmit the disease, sometimes they're visible, sometimes they're not. I mean, we'd be talking something like a mosquito to the size of another person.
00:15:39
Speaker
And the symptoms that people exhibit from various diseases are tremendously variable. So the same disease might even show up differently in one person as compared to another person.
00:15:51
Speaker
And what that means, that amount of variation basically means that it's very difficult for processes like selection to target specific symptoms or specific cues in the environment. Instead, what you end up with is this whole host of sort of generalized features that people become very responsive to. So for instance,
00:16:14
Speaker
It does turn out that for the most of the diseases that are true dangers to people, it's something like 90 to 95% of those show up in terms of symptoms in the face. So people pay a lot of attention to facial features of other of others.
00:16:33
Speaker
And, but like I said, there's not one specific cue that's associated with all diseases or even one disease. So what people do is they end up paying attention to features that suggest some signs of abnormality or possible disfigurement in the face, so asymmetries in the face. And those could come from a host of places, right? So they could come from infection.
00:17:00
Speaker
But they also could come from all sorts of things that people do throughout their lives, right? So you could have a scar on your face from the time you fell down on the playground.
00:17:10
Speaker
or you could have certain kinds of wrinkles that happen as you age, or just various asymmetries that occur naturally in the face. All of those have nothing to do. They don't suggest that you're any kind of disease threat. But when people are concerned about disease, they start reacting to those kinds of features as though they signal a possible threat.
00:17:33
Speaker
And so you end up seeing more essentially the idea is that you end up seeing more people who are treated stereotypically or treated with sort of these negative attitudes, these prejudices, just as a function of these relatively benign features that look a little bit different than we might expect normally. So if someone has some sort of facial asymmetry or they're somehow
00:18:04
Speaker
I mean, I guess it's a little hard to even talk about because I was going to say they're somehow not attractive in a way. But in some ways, I'm wondering if attractiveness is somehow related to this, right? That that's maybe a little bit of where those ideas may or where some of those biases may have come from in the first place.
00:18:24
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think that's a great point. Attractiveness does seem to be connected to this idea. I mean, obviously, I think it's a little bit more broad than attractiveness per se. It's really about this physical appearance more generally. And I think that what we tend to see is that the people who are treated most negatively by others who are concerned about disease are those people that are different than the average and primarily different than the average in more
00:18:54
Speaker
negative ways, so less attractive ways. So what we find in terms of attractiveness itself is that in at least there's some evidence that in places where people encounter more pathogens, so those could be places that are hotter and wetter, maybe near the equator where germs can can breed and spread more easily, people care more about the physical attractiveness of their relationship partners. And one possibility is that is that
00:19:24
Speaker
that bias towards caring more about attractiveness is happening because attractiveness is taken as this cue towards safety in other people. So this person looks more healthy. They look more symmetrical. And so because of that, it's not just that that cue is inherently attractive. It's that
00:19:45
Speaker
in a place or an environment where lots of people could be infected that might signal some resistance to disease or that that person isn't currently infected. So that's one way that attractiveness plays out. There's some other interesting ways that I'm happy to talk about as well in terms of what people pay attention to with respect to themselves. Yes, absolutely.
00:20:08
Speaker
Yeah, so it's certainly the case that people care about attractiveness in others when concerned about disease, but we've been finding in some relatively recent research that
00:20:20
Speaker
people also care about their own appearance to a much stronger degree when there is this concern around infectious disease in their minds. And so what people end up doing is they react as though their own appearance might be in question, that they might not seem as attractive or as safe to others.
00:20:46
Speaker
And so just think about the basic idea that if, when you're concerned about disease, if we know that you're paying attention to the appearance of other people, and everything I just talked about sort of suggested that, then it's also the case that individuals might say, hey, I'm paying attention to all these, the attractiveness of all these people or the appearance of all these people, maybe other people are doing the same thing to me.
00:21:09
Speaker
And in that sort of situation, it creates this kind of sense of a spotlight on the individual and the sense that other people are judging your physical appearance. So what do you do in a situation where other people might be skeptical about whether or not you have an infectious disease and judging that based on your appearance? Well, one thing you can do is adjust your appearance. And so one thing we find is that people
00:21:36
Speaker
end up becoming more interested when they're concerned about disease, they become more interested in various types of consumer products and behaviors that are designed to increase attractiveness, right? So thinking about things like makeup or even things as extreme as plastic surgery or liposuction, various kinds of ways in which people can make their own appearance look more attractive to others.
00:22:05
Speaker
Now this is interesting. So is this anything that you've noticed recently? Because my intuition right now is at least in the early stages of COVID-19. I've seen a lot of people walking around outside in sweatpants and not necessarily
00:22:21
Speaker
Maybe, I don't know if it's a different stage of things where, I guess my guess might be that coming up maybe we'll see something like this a little more, but right now most of the people that I see outside look more anxious and less attractive to me, I guess.
00:22:42
Speaker
Yes, so there might be some competing motivations here, right? So when people are concerned about disease, they're also less interested in sort of romantic behavior with other people. Right. Yeah, so there could be a perceiver bias there. But I think you're right that there's likely to be different stages of this process. So
00:23:03
Speaker
By attractiveness and interest in affecting your own appearance, that doesn't actually necessarily mean that the clothes that you wear are going to be that important. But it might mean that you want to, if we know that a lot of the features of disease show up in the face, it might mean that you really want to adjust what your face looks like in certain ways.
00:23:22
Speaker
So, so far, I don't think we have the data on this, but I would be really interested to see if over the progression of the COVID-19 pandemic, at least in the US, whether it's the case that sales, not just of products related to hygiene and safety go up, but sales of things like related to appearance adjusting products, so makeup and so on.
00:23:47
Speaker
I love that. That is a really interesting idea and definitely I think a counterintuitive claim too. So it's interesting to see how that plays out. Yeah, I mean, I think that would be really fascinating. I think that there's
00:24:02
Speaker
There's some things working against it in terms of the idea that if people really are sheltering in place, then maybe there's just fewer people that they are paying attention to in terms of that spotlight. So they might not feel as observed as in a less epidemic type of setting. But I think it would be really interesting to see. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. The research, a lot of this stuff, it sounds like,
00:24:30
Speaker
The way that it's done is comparing situations where people are sort of activated with regards to their behavioral immune system versus not activated or less activated, sort of varying the degree of activation of how concerned you are at a given point with potential disease. I think we're in a pretty extreme example of that right now, right?
00:24:55
Speaker
Yes, definitely. So yeah, I mean, I think this is something that I've talked with some other researchers about, but still.
00:25:03
Speaker
sort of we're waiting to see what happens.
How Does Media Influence Pandemic Perception?
00:25:05
Speaker
I mean, there's so many projects that just got launched in the past few weeks looking at these kinds of effects. But yeah, I mean, we have this really extreme situational cue to disease. And so it's a very top of mind threat in people's minds right now. And so it's almost as though everybody has been primed to be concerned about this. And so I think one possibility is that
00:25:33
Speaker
it might ceiling out some of the effects we would normally find. And so thinking about how you design research projects and so on to address that, maybe instead of having a, there is no standard control condition anymore, let's say in an experiment, but instead what you're trying to do is make people feel safer in comparison to their natural state of awareness around COVID-19.
00:25:56
Speaker
A lot of this is about calibrating to the right threat level. In an ideal world, we'd like people to be able to calibrate to the right threat level. That has something to do with the information that they're given and you want people to respond appropriately but not too strongly. What does this say about how people are receiving information from the media or from the government?
00:26:25
Speaker
Should people try to – I don't know if I want to ask you for advice on this, but do you think people should be trying to restrict their information somewhat so that they're not overreacting? If the right scale of 1 to 100, if the right reaction to this is maybe an 80,
00:26:41
Speaker
We want to see people move towards that mark, not perceive too much of a threat, but not too little of a threat. How do you deal with the flood of information that's coming in? Everybody's thinking about this right now. How do you get the real information and sort out what's not necessarily relevant? Yeah. It is definitely something that everybody is going through right now.
00:27:12
Speaker
What I would think is that incorrect information or perceiving the threat level is too high is going to be a chronically stressful condition for people.
00:27:26
Speaker
Absolutely. And I think there's going to be a couple of possible responses, some of which we have seen, at least in terms of reporting on various people's behavior. So one is what you're saying, and that's the real amping up of this stress and what that does to people over that period of time when not only are they feeling stressed because of all this information about danger that's coming in,
00:27:51
Speaker
But they're also relatively isolated from other people. And we know that other people are a good source of stress relief. So the social connections that we have help us manage those kinds of responses. So many people, I think, are going to be at very increased risk for all the kinds of negative outcomes of stress that occur. I think also there's one even maybe more extreme response that we've seen, and that is for some people anyway.
00:28:17
Speaker
what they could do as a result of that information, the sort of uncertain, is it true, is it false information, and the stress associated with that is sort of going the other direction, that is start to act more complacent or almost as though they're feeling more invulnerable to things. And I think that's somewhat representative of
00:28:37
Speaker
some of the behaviors that we've seen, maybe more in younger people, where they're continuing, at least prior to this sort of more top-down regulation of behavior from the government, where people were just congregating in
00:28:56
Speaker
parties and social settings and so on and if you read any of the news reports about these it was people often saying things like yeah, I just don't think it's that big a deal or If I get it, it's fine. And so I'm so it's this kind of almost complacent invulnerability response And that certainly sounds like an an under estimation of the threat level. Yeah and maladaptive as well. Yeah maladaptive is
00:29:22
Speaker
Maybe for them. I mean, at the time, I think that probably many people thought that younger people were at less risk, whether or not that's true. I mean, I think we're getting some more conflicting information about that. But it definitely would be increasing the risk for other people. So with the spread of the interpersonal spread of the disease. Yeah, it's so interesting how that plays into the in-group, out-group issue.
00:29:46
Speaker
I mean, there's so many ways we could go with that discussion, but yeah, I think I wanted to just say one more thing, kind of touching back on this point of the amount of information people are getting. I mean, I think that here's here's a hypothesis I have and it's, you know, it's
00:30:03
Speaker
I don't know how well grounded it is, but people are getting all this information about this disease. And what I think it leads to is, as you said, this kind of stress response or just constant anxiety. So what do we know that people do when they are anxious? Well, one of those things they do is they look for immediate answers to their problem.
00:30:26
Speaker
So they tend to process information in a little bit more of a superficial manner, so they're taking in some of that information, but they're really looking for something that's going to tell them either what to do or how to be safe or that everything's okay. And so these days, where do people turn for that information? Well, many people, they could be looking at the news, but a lot of people are looking at social media.
00:30:50
Speaker
And so social media is providing this constant stream of information. And it's not all consistent, right? So people are getting information, it could be sometimes good information, it could be bad information, but it's often saying many different things. And so I think one implication of that is that people are looking for answers and they're getting a lot of answers, but those answers aren't consistent. And so what I think that's going to do is simply increase the amount of anxiety.
00:31:19
Speaker
that people are experiencing. So one consequence of that, or one thing you might tell people to do who are trying to deal with this avalanche of information, is to honestly step back a little bit from their social media use. Because that actually might be, although it seems like a source of comfort, and for many people it might be, it also could be increasing the level of stress that people are experiencing.
00:31:47
Speaker
That's always good advice, but especially now for sure. Yeah, no, that's, that's really good advice. Yeah. I mean, in terms of just the flow of information, you know, it's, it is interesting how people do kind of short circuit their thought process when they're in these high levels of anxiety. I mean, what are some of the other consequences of that? Do you think, um, I mean, I think people are,
00:32:16
Speaker
So there's definitely this more shallow information processing. I think it also leads people to...
00:32:23
Speaker
essentially follow their more heuristic kind of reactions to things. So essentially acting in a somewhat more, I mean, you could call it a more emotional manner or a less rational manner. So people aren't necessarily stopping as easily or as quickly to think about the why of their behavior, like what's driving it. And so you might see
00:32:48
Speaker
higher levels of all sorts of various threat responses, right? So people could become more frustrated more easily, that could potentially lead to increased aggression in certain situations.
00:32:59
Speaker
And again, given that the type of information that we're getting isn't always consistent, that could actually have a real negative downside of, uh, leading people to just be less trusting of any of the information that they're getting. And that could obviously create problems for creating, for, um, trying to situate a community response to thing or a public health kind of message. Certainly with testing, it seems like that's a big topic there where
00:33:30
Speaker
The lack of availability of testing in the United States especially is leading to this uncertainty about who is sick and who is not sick. And it feels like that is one of the things that's contributing to this high level of uncertainty and anxiety.
00:33:47
Speaker
Absolutely. Again, we're still in that phase where most people aren't seeing in their daily lives. They're not seeing other people who are showing active signs of infection by and large. That essentially means that people are being told that everybody is a potential danger. Everybody you encounter is a threat.
00:34:09
Speaker
without being able to actually judge that in a meaningful way for yourself. And so that's gonna just create this sense that the, almost that everyone around you is a potential danger. And obviously that's gonna really amp up the threat response. And when you're certainly walking outside, when you're, you know, in my experience, walking outside, people,
00:34:38
Speaker
people have been avoiding me by at least 10 feet or so. And I guess it certainly feels like there's an era of paranoia out there where everybody must avoid everyone else by a pretty great distance. And in a normal situation, how would that make you feel if everyone was avoiding you by 10 feet? Pretty strangely, right?
00:35:03
Speaker
I don't know if you're getting this where you are, but at least in Ann Arbor, I mean, the experience is a weird one because you're right. Everybody here is acting in a sort of suspicious way. Yeah, it would be really suspicious if it weren't for what's going on, yeah.
00:35:19
Speaker
Yeah, so you get this level of suspicion and sort of aversion to others, but at the same time, at least in this community, people seem to be also pairing that with this reaction, like we're all in it together. And so when you see all these people out on the street walking, exercising, whatever it is,
00:35:38
Speaker
They're constantly trying to avoid everybody else, but at the same time, they're acting in really friendly ways. Well, maybe that's just Michigan, I don't know. No, actually, it's been pretty friendly here, too. I think people are pretty friendly in Rhode Island, and I do get that sense.
00:35:54
Speaker
I do get that sense. There's almost this 9-11 sense of we're all in it together, which is interesting. And this is something I thought about with what you're talking about with in groups and out groups, that maybe there are these two contradictory impulses here. One, that we're all in this together. In other words, that our in group is all of humanity. And the other one, that we need to protect ourselves from anyone who's outside of our immediate circle.
00:36:24
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think what that kind of weird pairing presents is this sort of cognitive conflict that people are experiencing. So some of the work on disgust and disease threat suggests that there is a really opposing set of motivations that occur when disease threat is active versus the desire to affiliate with other people, to make friends,
00:36:53
Speaker
sort of re-established connections with people and so forth. And those have opposing dynamics. And so when one is strong, the other is weak. When one goes up, the other goes down. Here we have this situation where people are doing both. Right. I mean, at least for me, how many times have you been outside and said, hey, good to see you. Don't come close to me. Thanks to see you from across the street. Stay there. Yeah.
00:37:19
Speaker
So I wonder if there have you noticed if there or have you thought about if there are any people who may be hit particularly hard by this kind of this kind of psychological things that are going on with COVID-19? And I guess I'm thinking
00:37:36
Speaker
Someone with an existing predisposition to stress or say OCD, someone who's already may have some paranoia towards pathogens or something like that. Do you think there are particularly vulnerable people in this situation? Yeah, I definitely do. And I think that there's probably
00:37:56
Speaker
several different factors that would lead maybe different types of people to experience that vulnerability. So there are certainly these chronic individual differences in terms of how sensitive people are to disease threats. And that could be just people who are just like have a heightened, discussed response. It could be people that feel like they're more vulnerable to getting sick. So you might think about people who have
00:38:21
Speaker
chronic condition, health conditions that might impact their immune functioning. Those kinds of people I think are going to be much more
00:38:30
Speaker
aware of and stressed by the constant need to be on guard around these things. And so I think those are some of the people that are going to be especially concerned with this kind of this kind of information that we're getting. And I think there are also some additional kind of interesting social categories where we might expect people to be to show more of a threat response. Yeah, one of the things that
00:38:59
Speaker
comes up in this, and we've sort of touched on it lightly a couple of times, is the, but I feel like it would be remiss to sort of not directly discuss it, is the in-group, out-group issue. In particular, this is something that is topical and in the news because of the way that people in the government, especially in executive branch of the government, are talking about
Language and In-Group/Out-Group Dynamics in Politics
00:39:30
Speaker
COVID-19 and the words that they're using to describe the virus and the way that that sort of plays on some of these fears that are escalated or enhanced by this behavioral immune reaction. Specifically thinking about this term, the Chinese virus, which I think is just, it's really disgusting to even
00:40:00
Speaker
Yeah, say it out loud, but like, it feels like it's something that we should talk about because it is so relevant to the research here. Yeah, I mean, I agree. I think that there very well might be some intentional language use around some of these ideas. I mean, so the question
00:40:22
Speaker
is if that is intentional, what is it really designed to do? So we do know, like I was saying, that when people are really actively concerned about disease or chronically concerned about it, they do tend to show these stronger in-group, out-group effects, more negativity towards other groups of people. But they also tend to show these, so I mentioned that social norm issue, they also tend to show more
00:40:53
Speaker
tight-knit connections within their own group, so they tend to show somewhat more conformity and adherence to those norms, right? If lots of people are paying attention to whether you're violating a norm, then of course you're going to want to not violate that norm.
00:41:07
Speaker
And so this language that's being used to exaggerate the group differences might actually, one possibility is that it's designed to really target not the other groups of people, not people who are Chinese and so forth, but really target the core audience that somebody who's using that language cares about. And by doing that, it's really designed to get them to kind of cohere
00:41:34
Speaker
Essentially, I mean, the extreme version of that would be to fall in line. So sort of a in-group dog whistle. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, just as an academic aside here, how in the research do you differentiate the effects of something that you would consider like a behavioral immune system activation versus just other generalized anxiety? I mean, a lot of these effects of increased
00:42:03
Speaker
in-group, out-group behavior and stereotypy, more conformity, more what you might call conservatism are things that would happen after say, for example, like 9-11 is a good example, right? You saw all those same behaviors at that time as well. I mean, how do you in the research differentiate that from just generalized anxiety?
00:42:28
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, that's a great point. And it's certainly the case that this kind of response to cues or threats of disease fits within the larger idea of how people manage threats and the various sort of generalized threat responses like anxiety that people experience.
Behavioral Immune System vs. General Anxiety
00:42:46
Speaker
So the ways, I would say there's sort of a conceptual version of this and an empirical version. So,
00:42:53
Speaker
empirically what people will sometimes do, not probably often enough, honestly, but what sometimes people will do is when they design a study, they'll try to contrast different types of threat responses. So you might think about if you're trying to activate a concern among disease, then you might also contrast that with activation of a different kind of a threat cue. So we've done this with respect to physical accidents,
00:43:22
Speaker
economic threats, threat of interpersonal theft, and so different things that should also create anxiety, but maybe the response that we would consider to be functional from the point of view of behavioral immune system wouldn't necessarily align with the response you would expect to see for those other threats.
00:43:45
Speaker
So I think that's the empirical version of how people who are doing the research tend to do this. Conceptually, though, I think that we could make the case, sort of building off of the findings in this literature, that there are
00:44:01
Speaker
at least three big categories of response or sensitivity that people have that could be used to distinguish responses that are disease specific to responses that are tied to other types of threats or more general anxieties.
00:44:21
Speaker
And so those, at least the ones we've been exploring, those categories are, one is a prior contact. So people who are concerned about disease do seem to have this belief, and it makes sense from the perspective of germ theory, but I think it goes well beyond germ theory, this idea that things that other people have touched now become dangerous.
00:44:48
Speaker
And that response doesn't align with a lot of other threats that we could investigate. So there's this issue of prior contact, which I think has some threat specificity to it. There's this additional issue of familiarity. So people become very
00:45:08
Speaker
sensitized to, concerned with, and reactive to, cues of familiarity, right? So who's like you? Who's not like you? Who do you recognize? Who don't you recognize? Even to the extent, not just in people, but for instance food. So people who are concerned about disease become much more avoidant and adverse to
00:45:32
Speaker
foreign cuisines, right? And not only that, they're not just becoming more avoidant. Generally, they actually show an increased approach response to familiar foods, things they've eaten before. And so they got this, this category of familiarity that really ties in to disease threat. And the third category is a sensitivity to, I'll just call it irregularity.
00:45:57
Speaker
But this kind of goes back to what we were talking about earlier with respect to, let's say, facial cues of abnormality or disfigurement or so forth. People are more reactive to those physical features that suggest something is a little bit off. And so those are the three things that I think stand out in terms of the work in this literature that help to differentiate it from other types of more generalized threat responses.
00:46:26
Speaker
Oh, interesting. Okay, that's really helpful to understand how this works. I guess the question that I have too is, to what extent is a lot of this related to associations between certain cues and illness that are learned over the course of a lifetime? Because certainly in psychology we know that
00:46:49
Speaker
taste aversion, so a taste of some kind of flavored water that later leads to illness is something that animals pick up on really quickly and forms a really fast association because of course you can be dead if you poison yourself.
00:47:09
Speaker
So yeah, the idea of this, I guess it harkens back to this idea of preparedness to learn specific types of associations between things. So yeah, so if you eat a food that makes you sick, then you're gonna avoid that specific food or certain qualities of that food in the future. With respect to non-food-based learning, I think that we,
00:47:37
Speaker
I'm trying to think of whether or not we actually have good information on this in terms of thinking about development. Nothing in particular is coming to mind, but I think it makes a lot of sense that a person who has experienced a certain type of disease, whether it's in themselves or in close others, are going to prioritize those kinds of cues in terms of what they look for and the potential threats that exist out there in the world.
00:48:05
Speaker
In your review article, you talk about sickness behaviors. So the kinds of behaviors that people exhibit once they're sick that are not necessarily immune reactions, but specific kinds of things to protect themselves from further danger. I guess one example of this is hyperalgesia that
00:48:28
Speaker
that you have an increased sensitivity to pain after, you know, if you have a bodily illness, and that's something that has an adaptive function in that when you're more sensitive to pain, you'll, you know, you'll crawl underneath your covers and try to avoid everyone else for a couple days. So, yeah, just wondering what your thoughts are about that.
00:48:51
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, so sickness behavior, I think is this, it's sort of, again, a suite of behaviors that's presumably designed to help reduce energy expenditure in people. So if you're currently sick and your physiological immune system is in high gear,
00:49:09
Speaker
then it takes a lot of energy and a lot of calories to ramp that up and keep it going and hopefully minimize the collateral damage that's going on with that immune system response. And so one of the ways people do that is by essentially shutting down the unnecessary activities that they might otherwise engage in. And the best way to do that in terms of your brain convincing to do that is by making you feel bad.
00:49:37
Speaker
And so, yeah, so people sort of staying in bed and attempting to conserve the calories that they have in order to fight off those illnesses. So I think that that's kind of the prototypical version of this behavioral set of responses that happens once people are sick.
00:50:04
Speaker
I don't know if I'd count this as like a dirty little secret of work in pathogen avoidance psychology or behavioral immune system work, but it's typically not done with people who are actively sick. So it's really thinking about this idea. And it's not really a secret because the whole idea of the behavioral immune system is to ward off initial infection. But there's this really unresolved set of questions, I think.
00:50:26
Speaker
where what happens to those behavioral strategies once people are actually infected by something? Are they still showing those same kinds of biases that they might show prior to illness? Or does this sickness behavior kind of overwhelm those and really just shut people down altogether?
00:50:44
Speaker
Yeah. Well, I mean, maybe that's a good segue into asking like a final question, which would be, you know, where do you see this research going? And, you know, I guess given that it's such a topical thing right now, how do you see the impact of the coronavirus, you know, on the research?
00:51:07
Speaker
I almost can't answer because there are so many directions that we could potentially take this in. I think that the answers that we have so far are in these basic individualized responses when people are concerned about disease, but there's all sorts of interesting, broader questions that could be at least
00:51:30
Speaker
given some insight through understanding how these processes work. So here's a couple of possibilities. One is we could turn internally. So there's this big question about how do this behavioral set of strategies, these behavioral immune strategies that people show, how do they interface with the physiological immune system, if at all?
Disease Concerns and Political Attitudes
00:51:53
Speaker
Right? So is it the case that if I become really actively concerned about disease, does that somehow change my immune functioning and vice versa? So if my immune functioning is ramping up or becoming depressed, does that change how I start behaviorally reacting? And there's been some initial work on this, but I think it's difficult stuff to do. And so I think there's a lot of questions that are currently in play
00:52:22
Speaker
with respect to this. And maybe some tracking of people as they progress, let's say people who actually become infected from COVID-19, tracking various sorts of psychological responses would give us an insight to that. So we could turn internally, but I think probably one of the more wide ranging sort of applications of these ideas is to turn towards society more broadly.
00:52:48
Speaker
And so for instance, there's this interesting body of work within this field that suggests that political attitudes and behavior are affected by these disease concerns. And so sort of really nicely linking up with what I was saying earlier about this increased attention to your in-group, what your in-group is doing, the norms people are following, are they violating them, the increased conformity
00:53:14
Speaker
All of that together culminates in terms of political attitudes and behavior with the idea that people will show an increased desire to maintain the status quo and that they might also become a little bit more open to conservative thinking. So if the idea is that more conservative thinking is trying to maintain current norms,
00:53:41
Speaker
And so what we see in that literature is that people who are actively concerned about disease or just who live in places where there's more disease happening tend to show more conservative attitude. They express more conservative attitudes. There's some evidence of increased voting behavior for more conservative politicians or incumbent politicians.
00:54:04
Speaker
And so I think there's a lot in there that's going to be interesting with respect to how sort of political behavior progresses during this epidemic. Because we have, not just that, we have all these situations of, well, what happens when people are
00:54:21
Speaker
interested in voting for various political candidates, but now they have to navigate these social environments where other people might be, let's say, at the voting booth. What do people do? Do they just avoid voting altogether? Do they take alternate strategies? And so I think that there's a number of sort of like, at least in that area of sort of societal implications, I think there'll be some very interesting work coming out.
Episode Conclusion and Contact Information
00:54:47
Speaker
Um, really appreciate you joining us on the show to talk about this stuff. This is incredibly informative. Um, so Josh Ackerman, again, thanks a lot. Thanks, Josh. That's a really fascinating conversation. Yeah. And, uh, take care and stay healthy. Same to you both.
00:55:22
Speaker
Hope you enjoyed the show. You can get a hold of us on Twitter at nationcog on Facebook, or you can email us at cognationpodcast at gmail.com. We'd love to hear from you.