Abstract

People vary in the degree to which they experience disgust toward—and, consequently, avoid—cues to pathogens. Prodigious work has measured this variation and observed that it relates to, among other things, personality, psychopathological tendencies, and moral and political sentiments. Less work has sought to generate hypotheses aimed at explaining why this variation exists in the first place, and even less work has evaluated how well data support these hypotheses. In this talk, I will describe the evidence supporting (or refuting) multiple intuitive hypotheses, including (1) that variability in disgust sensitivity is a component of neuroticism, (2) that variability in disgust sensitivity is shaped by parental modeling, and (3) that variability in disgust sensitivity is shaped by infectious disease in the ecology. After evaluating these hypotheses, I will explain how the behavioral immune system should take other factors as input - such as social interdependence and nutritional stress - in outputting disgust.

Joshua is an Associate Professor in the Department of Experimental and Applied Psychology at VU Amsterdam.

 Joshua's personal webpage

Reference

Joshua Tybur (VU Amsterdam), “Why do people vary in disgust? Insights from behavioral immune system research”, IAST General Seminar, Toulouse: IAST, November 16, 2018, 11:30–12:30, room MF 323.