Outgroup Equals Infectiousness? Re-Evaluating the Pathogen Avoidance Account of Xenophobia
Xenophobia is thought to emerge, in part, from the behavioral immune system. We conducted two studies—a longitudinal study and an experiment—to test this hypothesis from two different perspectives. The longitudinal study, assessed at four time points of the COVID-19 pandemic in the Netherlands—May 2020, N1 = 998; February 2021, N2 = 711; October 2021, N3 = 549; June 2022, N4 = 537—investigated changes in negative attitudes towards immigrants, their relation to explicit disease concerns, and disgust sensitivity. Results revealed that explicit disease concerns were heightened during more severe stages of the pandemic, though disgust sensitivity and negative attitudes towards immigrants remained stable across the time points. Between-person variations in disgust sensitivity were related to xenophobic attitudes, but neither explicit disease concerns nor the assessment times during the pandemic showed significant effects. The experimental study, conducted in the UK (N = 1371) and China (N = 1533), examined whether people are less comfortable with microbe-sharing contact with members of an ethnic outgroup compared to an ethnic ingroup, and whether visual cues of a target’s infectiousness exacerbate this discomfort. Findings indicated lower comfort with targets appearing infectious, yet there was no significant difference in comfort levels between ethnic ingroup and outgroup targets, nor any interaction between group membership and appearance manipulation. Collectively, these results suggest that while stable individual differences in disgust sensitivity relate to xenophobia, this bias may not be solely attributable to the ‘behavioral immune system interpreting ethnic outgroup membership as an infection risk cue.