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…

• NS
  Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada
• SS
  Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada