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The fear of coronavirus is changing our psychology

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Covid-19

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The threat of contagion can twist our psychological responses to ordinary
interactions, leading us to behave in unexpected ways.

Author image

By David Robson

2nd April 2020

R

Rarely has the threat of disease occupied so much of our thinking. For
weeks, almost every newspaper has stories about the coronavirus
pandemic on its front page; radio and TV programmes have back-to-back
coverage on the latest death tolls; and depending on who you follow,
social media platforms are filled with frightening statistics,
practical advice or gallows humour.

As others have already reported, this constant bombardment can result
in [26]heightened anxiety, with immediate effects on our mental health.
But the constant feeling of threat may have other, more insidious,
effects on our psychology. Due to some deeply evolved responses to
disease, fears of contagion lead us to become more conformist and
tribalistic, and less accepting of eccentricity. Our moral judgements
become harsher and our social attitudes more conservative when
considering issues such as immigration or sexual freedom and equality.
Daily reminders of disease may even sway our political affiliations.

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The [30]recent reports of increased xenophobia and racism may already
be the first sign of this, but if the predictions of the scientific
research are correct, they may reflect much deeper social and
psychological shifts.

The behavioural immune system

Like much of human psychology, these responses to disease need to be
understood in the context of prehistory. Before the birth of modern
medicine, infectious disease would have been one of the biggest threats
to our survival. The immune system has some amazing mechanisms to hunt
and kill those pathogenic invaders. Unfortunately, these reactions
leave us feeling sleepy and lethargic – meaning that our sickly
ancestors would have been unable to undertake essential activities,
like hunting, gathering or childrearing.
[p088cd3z.jpg]

Infectious disease has been shaping our evolution for millions of
years, altering our psychology as well as our physiology (Credit: Getty
Images)

Fears of contagion lead us to become more conformist and less accepting of
eccentricity. Our moral judgements become harsher and our sexual attitudes
become more conservative

Being ill is also physiologically expensive. The rise in body
temperature during a fever, for instance, is essential for an effective
immune response – but this results in a 13% increase in the body’s
energy consumption. When food was scarce, that would have been a
serious burden. “Getting sick, and allowing this wonderful immune
system to actually work, is really costly,” says Mark Schaller at the
University of British Columbia in Vancouver. “It’s kind of like medical
insurance – it’s great to have, but it really sucks when you have to
use it.”

Anything that reduces the risk of infection in the first place should
therefore have offered a distinct survival advantage. For this reason,
we evolved a set of unconscious psychological responses – which
Schaller has termed the “[31]behavioural immune system” – to act as a
first line of defence to reduce our contact with potential pathogens.

The disgust response is one of the most obvious components of the
behavioural immune system. When we avoid things that smell bad or food
that we believe to be unclean, we are instinctively trying to steer
clear of potential contagion. Just the merest suggestion that we have
already eaten something rotten can lead us to vomit, expelling the food
before the infection has had the chance to take root. Research suggests
that we also tend to more strongly remember material that triggers
disgust, allowing us to remember (and avoid) the situations that could
put us at risk of infection later on.

Since humans are a social species that evolved to live in big groups,
the behavioural immune system also modified our interactions with
people to minimise the spread of disease, leading to a kind of
instinctive social distancing.

These responses can be quite crude, since our ancestors would have had
no understanding of the specific causes of each disease or the way they
were transmitted. “The behavioural immune system operates on a ‘better
safe than sorry’ logic,” says Lene Aarøe at Aarhus University in
Denmark. This means the responses are often misplaced, and may be
triggered by irrelevant information – altering our moral decision
making and political opinions on issues that have nothing to do with
the current threat.

Conform or leave

Let’s first consider our general attitudes to cultural norms – and the
people who break them.
[p088cdk0.jpg]

The disgust response has evolved as one way that we avoid things that
might make us ill, like a food or drink that has gone off (Credit:
Getty Images)

Various experiments have shown that we become more conformist and
respectful of convention when we feel the threat of a disease. Schaller
first primed participants to feel threatened by infection, by asking
them to describe a time when they had previously been ill, and [32]then
gave them various tests that measured their tendency to conform. In one
test, he presented students with a proposed change to the university’s
grading system, for example – they could vote by placing a penny in a
jar marked “agree” or “disagree”. A heightened sensitivity to disease
led the participants to follow the herd and place their penny in the
jar with the highest number of coins. They were swayed by popularity
rather than going against the grain with their own opinion.

When asked about the kinds of people they liked, meanwhile,
participants who were worried about illness also tended to prefer
“conventional” or “traditional” individuals, and less likely to feel an
affinity with “creative” or “artistic” people. Apparently any signs of
free thinking – even invention and innovation – become less valued when
there is the risk of contagion. In explicit questionnaires, they are
also more likely to agree with statements such as “breaking social
norms can have harmful, unintended consequences”.

Those primes might seem to be rather distant from the TV and online
coverage we are all facing today. But researchers at the University of
Hong Kong have also primed people with scenes from the film Outbreak,
which might more closely resemble some of the news reports today; the
[33]evocative images of a pandemic led them to value conformity and
obedience over eccentricity or rebellion.

Moral vigilance

Why would the behavioural immune system shift our thinking in this way?
Schaller argues that many of our tacit social rules – such as the ways
we can and can’t prepare food, the amount of social contact that is and
isn’t accepted, or how to dispose of human waste – can help to reduce
the risk of infection. “Throughout much of human history, a lot of
norms and rituals serve this function of keeping diseases at bay,”
Schaller says. “Folks who conform to those norms served a public health
service, and people who violated those norms not only put themselves at
risk but affected others as well.” As a result, it’s beneficial to
become more respectful of convention in the face of a contagious
outbreak.
[p088cf0b.jpg]

Even thinking about a situation like a pandemic can make people value
conformity over eccentricity (Credit: Getty Images)

The same logic may explain why we become [34]more morally vigilant in
an outbreak. Studies have shown that when we fear contagion, we tend to
be harsher when judging a breach of loyalty (such as an employee who
badmouths his company) or when we see someone who fails to respect an
authority (such as a judge). Those particular incidents would do
nothing to spread disease of course, but by flouting convention, they
have given a signal that they may break other more relevant rules that
are there to keep disease at bay.

Even extremely subtle reminders of illness can shape our behaviours and
attitudes. Simply asking people to stand next a hand sanitiser
triggered [35]one study’s participants to express more conservative
(with a small “c”) attitudes associated with a greater respect for
tradition and convention.

In the same study, a reminder to wash their hands led participants to
be more judgemental of unconventional sexual behaviours. They were less
forgiving of a woman who was said to masturbate while holding her
childhood teddy bear, for example, or a couple who had sex in the bed
of one of their grandmothers.

Fear of outsiders

Besides making us harsher judges of the people within our social group,
the threat of disease can also lead us be more distrustful of
strangers. That’s bad news if you’re dating. In both online profiles
and face-to-face meetings, Natsumi Sawada at McGill University in
Canada has found that we form worse first impressions of other people
if we feel vulnerable to infection. Further research has shown that
[36]conventionally less-attractive people are judged especially harshly
– perhaps because we mistake their homely features for a sign of ill
health.

Our heightened distrust and suspicion will also shape our responses to
people of different cultural backgrounds. According to Schaller, this
may arise from those fears about non-conformity: in the past, people
outside our group may have been less likely to observe the specific
prescriptive norms that were meant to protect the population from
infection, and so we feared that they would unwittingly (or
deliberately) spread disease. But today, it can result in prejudice and
xenophobia.
[p088cg3q.jpg]

Reports of racism toward people of Asian heritage have surged during
the coronavirus pandemic (Credit: Getty Images)

Aarøe, for instance, has found that [37]fear of disease can influence
people’s attitudes to immigration. She emphasises this is part of the
behavioural immune system’s “better safe than sorry” approach. “It’s a
misinterpretation” of irrelevant cues that occurs “when the evolved
mind meets the multiculturalism and ethnic diversity of modern times,
which was not a recurrent phenomenon for most of our evolutionary
history,” she says.

Coping with Covid-19

The influence of the behavioural immune system varies from individual
to individual; not everyone would be affected to the same degree. “Some
people have a particularly sensitive behavioural immune system that
makes them react extra-strongly to things that they interpret as a
potential infection risk,” says Aarøe. According to the research, those
people would already be more respectful of social norms and more
distrustful of outsiders than the average person, and an increased
threat of disease would simply harden their positions.

We do not yet have any hard data on the ways that the coronavirus
outbreak is changing our minds – but the theory of the behavioural
immune system would certainly suggest that it’s probable. Yoel Inbar,
at the University of Toronto, argues that it would be a relatively
moderate shift in overall opinion across the population, rather than a
huge lurch in social attitudes.

He found some evidence of social change during the 2014 Ebola epidemic,
which became a fixation of the international news: in a sample of more
than 200,000 people, [38]implicit attitudes to gay men and lesbians
appeared to dip slightly during the outbreak. “It was a natural
experiment where people are reading about disease threats a lot, and it
did look like it shifted attitudes a little.”

With the forthcoming US elections, it’s natural to question whether any
of this might influence people’s preferences for different candidates
or their reactions to certain policies. Schaller speculates that it
could play a small role, though he is sceptical that it will be an
overriding factor. “The more profound effects may not have anything to
do with [the behavioural immune system] but more directly to do with
the perception of just how well government officials are or are not
responding to the situation,” he says.

Even if these psychological shifts do not change the result of the
election at the national level, it is worth considering how they
influence our own personal reactions to the coronavirus. Whether we are
expressing a conformist opinion, judging another’s behaviour or trying
to understand the value of [39]different containment policies, we might
question whether our thoughts are really the result of rational
reasoning, or whether they might have been shaped by an ancient
response that evolved millennia before the discovery of germ theory.

--

David Robson is the author of [40]The Intelligence Trap, which examines
the psychology of our most common reasoning errors and evidence-based
strategies to improve our decision making. He is [41]@d_a_robson on
Twitter.

--

As an award-winning science site, BBC Future is committed to bringing
you evidence-based analysis and myth-busting stories around the new
coronavirus. You can read more of our [42]Covid-19 coverage here.

--

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