Conference Talk – HBES 2025

Extending Behavioral Immune Trade-Offs: Interpersonal Value in Disease Avoidance and Social Interactions Rooted in Behavioral Immune System (BIS) theory, this research line investigates how interpersonal value shapes social interactions—particularly infection-risky contact, disease concealment, and xenophobia—under high disease salience. Three projects were conducted. The first (three studies, N = 1,694) used U.S. samples to test whether […]

New Article Online: 

Comfort with microbe-sharing contact across the COVID-19 pandemic: testing behavioral immune system predictions

Comfort with microbe-sharing contact across the COVID-19 pandemic: testing behavioral immune system predictions Hongyu Sun, Lei Fan, Joshua M. Tybur Published on Evolution and Human Behavior Doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2025.106710 Abstract Theory within the behavioral immune system literature suggests that pathogen-avoidance adaptations should lead to increased contact avoidance under conditions of increased disease salience. The current study examined this hypothesis by assessing […]

Conference Talk – DPSA 2024

Social class in the mind’s eye: Mental representations, egalitarianism, and discrimination Motivation: Recent declines in explicit bias have, unfortunately, not been accompanied by substantial reductions in group-based inequality. This suggests that implicit biases—relatively unconscious, automatic judgments—may play powerful roles in reinforcing existing social inequalities. The current work examines implicit biases through the lens of social […]

Conference Talk – CBEN 2024

Social class in the mind’s eye: Mental representations, egalitarianism, and discrimination Motivation: Recent declines in explicit bias have, unfortunately, not been accompanied by substantial reductions in group-based inequality. This suggests that implicit biases—relatively unconscious, automatic judgments—may play powerful roles in reinforcing existing social inequalities. The current work examines implicit biases through the lens of social […]

New Article Online:

Salience of infectious diseases did not increase xenophobia during the COVID-19 pandemic

Salience of infectious diseases did not increase xenophobia during the COVID-19 pandemic Lei Fan, Joshua M. Tybur, Paul A. M. Van Lange Published on Evolutionary Human Sciences https://doi.org/10.1017/ehs.2024.28 Multiple proposals suggest that xenophobia increases when infectious disease threats are salient. The current longitudinal study tested this hypothesis by examining whether and how anti-immigrant sentiments varied […]

Conference Talk – CEPDISC 2024

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 […]

Conference Talk – HBES 2024

Outrage in Moral Punishments: The Dual Dynamics of Anger and Disgust in Personal Experience and Social Signaling Exploring the emotional landscape in moral punishments, two projects examine the roles of anger and disgust in responses to moral transgressions, through perspectives of personal experience and social signaling. The first project, with two studies (N’s = 908, […]

New Affiliation

I’m thrilled to share that I’ve officially started my new postdoc appointment at the Centre for the Experimental-Philosophical study of Discrimination (CEPDISC), Department of Political Sciences, Aarhus BSS, Aarhus University, as of March 1st, 2024. I’m eager to dive into research and collaborations in this exciting new chapter of my academic journey. Stay tuned for […]

New Article Online:

Moral violations that target more valued victims elicit more anger, but not necessarily more disgust

Moral violations that target more valued victims elicit more anger, but not necessarily more disgust Lei Fan, Catherine Molho, Tom R. Kupfer, Joshua M. Tybur Published on Journal of Experimental Social Psychology https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002210312400009X The same moral violation can give rise to different emotional and behavioral responses in different individuals. The mechanisms that give rise to […]