Justin H. Park

Evolved Disease-Avoidance Mechanisms and Contemporary Xenophobic Attitudes

From evolutionary psychological reasoning, we derived the hypothesis that chronic and contextually aroused feelings of vulnerability to disease motivate negative reactions to foreign peoples. The hypothesis was tested and supported across four correlational studies: chronic disease worries predicted implicit cognitions associating foreign outgroups with danger, and also predicted less positive attitudes toward foreign (but not familiar) immigrant groups. The hypothesis also received support in two experiments in which the salience of contagious disease was manipulated: participants under high disease-salience conditions expressed less positive attitudes toward foreign (but not familiar) immigrants and were more likely to endorse policies that would favor the immigration of familiar rather than foreign peoples. These results reveal a previously under-explored influence on xenophobic attitudes, and suggest interesting linkages between evolved disease-avoidance mechanisms and contemporary social cognition.

The Behavioral Immune System (and Why It Matters)

Like many other animals, human beings engage in behavioral defenses against infectious pathogens. The behavioral immune system consists of a suite of psychological mechanisms that (a) detect cues connoting the presence of infectious pathogens in the immediate environment, (b) trigger disease-relevant emotional and cognitive responses, and thus (c) facilitate behavioral avoidance of pathogen infection. However, the system responds to an overly general set of superficial cues, which can result in aversive responses to things (including people) that pose no actual threat of pathogen infection. In addition, the system is flexible, such that more strongly aversive responses occur under conditions in which perceivers are (or merely perceive themselves to be) more vulnerable to pathogen infection. Recent research reveals many provocative implications—for the experience of disgust, for extraversion and social interaction, for xenophobia and other prejudices, and for the origins of cultural differences.

Fear of the Dark: Interactive Effects of Beliefs about Danger and Ambient Darkness on Ethnic Stereotypes

Two studies examined effects of ambient darkness and chronic beliefs about danger on activation of stereotypes about Blacks. Chronic beliefs were measured by a Belief in a Dangerous World (BDW) questionnaire. In Study, 1, participants in either a dimly lit or dark room saw photos of Black men and rated the extent to which specific traits described the cultural stereotype of Blacks. In Study 2, participants in either a well-lit or dark room completed reaction-time tasks assessing implicit associations between Blacks and evaluative attributes. Separate measures assessed stereotypes connoting danger versus those that are merely derogatory. Results revealed BDW × Darkness interactions on activation of danger-relevant stereotypes: BDW positively predicted activation in dark but not in light conditions. It appears that chronic beliefs about danger can facilitate activation of functionally relevant stereotypes, but this effect occurs primarily under circumstances (such as darkness) that heuristically suggest vulnerability to harm. Conceptual implications are discussed.

Prehistoric dangers and contemporary prejudices

We review the logical principles that guide the application of evolutionary ideas to psychological problems, and show how these principles can be used to derive novel, testable hypotheses about contemporary prejudice processes. We summarise two recent lines of research employing this approach. One line of research examines prejudices resulting from perceived vulnerability to physical injury. The other examines prejudices resulting from perceived vulnerability to disease. Results from both lines of research support novel psychological hypotheses identifying variables--pertaining to both personality and to local context--that trigger specific prejudices against specific categories of people. We conclude by discussing more broadly some of the useful conceptual and practical implications of this evolutionary approach to prejudice.

Parent-offspring conflict in mate preferences

Prevailing evolutionary approaches to human mating have largely ignored the fact that mating decisions are heavily influenced by parents and other kin. This is significant because parents and children often have conflicting mate preferences. We provide a brief review of how parents have influenced their childrens mating behavior across cultures and throughout history. Then, by drawing on evolutionary reasoning, we offer a hypothesis for why parents and offspring may have conflicting interests with respect to mate preferences. Specifically, parents may have a relatively stronger preference for childrens mates with characteristics suggesting high parental investment and cooperation with the ingroup, whereas children may have a relatively stronger preference for mates with characteristics signaling heritable fitness. We review past research consistent with this hypothesis, and we report new results from an empirical study consisting of 768 participants from a variety of cultures that provided clear support for the hypothesis.

Psychology of human kin recognition: Heuristic cues, erroneous inferences, and their implications

Humans possess explicit, rule-based, and culturally determined systems for identifying kin, but kinship inferences are also influenced implicitly by cue-based mechanisms found commonly across the animal kingdom. These mechanisms are fallible. An evolutionarily informed signal-detection analysis suggests that (a) cue-based kin recognition may sometimes be biased in favor of false-positive errors, resulting in implicit kinship inferences even in the presence of nonkin, and (b) the tendency toward this inferential error may vary predictably in response to specific developmental and contextual circumstances. This analysis has important implications for a wide variety of psychological phenomena (especially in the realms of person perception, interpersonal attraction, and prosocial behavior) and leads to the deduction of many novel hypotheses.

Cultural Variation in Parental Influence on Mate Choice

Contrary to assumptions underlying current psychological theories of human mating, throughout much of human history parents often controlled the mating behavior of their children. In the present research, the authors tested the hypothesis that the level of parental influence on mating is associated with the level of collectivism in a culture. A scale to assess the degree of parental influence on mate choice was administered to four samples: 371 students from the Netherlands; 197 young people from Kurdistan, Iraq; 80 students from 30 different countries studying in the Netherlands; and 102 students in Canada. As expected, the Kurdish sample reported higher levels of parental influence on mate choice than the Dutch sample, and parental influence was found to be higher in more collectivistic countries. In the Canadian sample, participants with an East Asian background (who have greater exposure to collectivistic cultural norms) indicated greater parental influence than did participants with a European background.

Parasite stress and pathogen avoidance relate to distinct dimensions of political ideology across 30 nations

Significance Pathogens, and antipathogen behavioral strategies, affect myriad aspects of human behavior. Recent findings suggest that antipathogen strategies relate to political attitudes, with more ideologically conservative individuals reporting more disgust toward pathogen cues, and with higher parasite stress nations being, on average, more conservative. However, no research has yet adjudicated between two theoretical accounts proposed to explain these relationships between pathogens and politics. We find that national parasite stress and individual disgust sensitivity relate more strongly to adherence to traditional norms than they relate to support for barriers between social groups. These results suggest that the relationship between pathogens and politics reflects intragroup motivations more than intergroup motivations. People who are more avoidant of pathogens are more politically conservative, as are nations with greater parasite stress. In the current research, we test two prominent hypotheses that have been proposed as explanations for these relationships. The first, which is an intragroup account, holds that these relationships between pathogens and politics are based on motivations to adhere to local norms, which are sometimes shaped by cultural evolution to have pathogen-neutralizing properties. The second, which is an intergroup account, holds that these same relationships are based on motivations to avoid contact with outgroups, who might pose greater infectious disease threats than ingroup members. Results from a study surveying 11,501 participants across 30 nations are more consistent with the intragroup account than with the intergroup account. National parasite stress relates to traditionalism (an aspect of conservatism especially related to adherence to group norms) but not to social dominance orientation (SDO; an aspect of conservatism especially related to endorsements of intergroup barriers and negativity toward ethnic and racial outgroups). Further, individual differences in pathogen-avoidance motives (i.e., disgust sensitivity) relate more strongly to traditionalism than to SDO within the 30 nations.

Persistent Misunderstandings of Inclusive Fitness and Kin Selection: Their Ubiquitous Appearance in Social Psychology Textbooks

Inclusive fitness theory and kin selection theory are among the most recognizable theories associated with evolutionary biology and psychology—they are also among the most widely misunderstood. The problem begins early, in undergraduate psychology textbooks. Here, ten social psychology textbooks were reviewed, and they were all found to contain at least one form of misunderstanding. Because these misunderstandings appear to result partly from peoples intuitions about kinship and adaptive behavior (which are not necessarily in line with the scientific theories), writers must be especially vigilant in order to combat the misunderstandings.

Disease-Avoidance Processes and Stigmatization: Cues of Substandard Health Arouse Heightened Discomfort With Physical Contact

ABSTRACT An evolutionary approach to stigmatization suggests that disease-avoidance processes contribute to some instances of social exclusion. Disease-avoidance processes are over-inclusive, targeting even non-threatening individuals who display cues of substandard health. We investigated whether such cues motivate avoidance of physical contact in particular. In Studies 1 and 2, targets with disease (e.g., leprosy) or atypical morphologies (e.g., amputated leg, obesity) were found to arouse differentially heightened discomfort with physical (versus nonphysical) contact, whereas a criminal target (stigmatized for disease-irrelevant reasons) was found to arouse elevated discomfort for both types of contact. Study 3 used a between-subjects design that eliminated the influence of extraneous factors. A diseased target was found to arouse differentially heightened discomfort with physical (versus nonphysical) contact, and to do so more strongly than any other type of target.