ReviewPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2015
Implications of the behavioural immune system for social behaviour and human health in the modern world.
Review in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 69 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
69 citing papers in PubMed.
- Sexual Stereotypes Ascribed to Black Men Who Have Sex with Men: An Intersectional Analysis.Archives of sexual behavior · 2018Trial
- Proximity Contacts and Self-perceived Vulnerability to Diseases Among High School Students - A Preliminary Study.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2026Article
- Depression in mothers at four weeks and twenty-four weeks postpartum: a study on the prevalence and selected risk factors in Sri Lanka.BMC pregnancy and childbirth · 2026Article
- Biosocial Factors Shaping Perceptions of Disease Risk Among a Community-Based Sample of Sexual and Gender Minority People Living in Toronto During the COVID-19 Pandemic.American journal of human biology : the official journal of the Human Biology Council · 2025Article
- The scent of mating strategy: sociosexual orientation was associated with olfaction and body odor sniffing behavior in Chinese and American populations.BMC psychology · 2025Article
- Healing with Risks: How Zoonotic Potential Influences the Use of Wild Mammals in Traditional Medicine.Pathogens (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Protective but Costly: The Impact of Behavioral Immune System Reactivity on Mental Health.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2025Article
- Trait xenophobia is more strongly related to maladaptive beliefs and pandemic health behaviors than affective symptoms.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Political Attitudes and Disease Threat: Regional Pathogen Stress Is Associated With Conservative Ideology Only for Older Individuals.Personality & social psychology bulletin · 2024Article
- The Shield of Self-Esteem: Buffering against the Impact of Traumatic Experiences, Fear, Anxiety, and Depression.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Article
- Beyond the surface: accounting for confounders in understanding the link between collectivism and COVID-19 pandemic in the United States.BMC public health · 2023Article
- I Got it. Perceived Infectability and Germ Aversion after Covid-19 Infection.Clinical neuropsychiatry · 2023Article
- COVID-19 vaccination and the behavioral immune system: The newcomer and the old friend get along in preventing infection.Brain, behavior, & immunity - health · 2023Article
- Coronavirus-Related Searches on the Internet Predict COVID-19 Vaccination Rates in the Real World: A Behavioral Immune System Perspective.Social psychological and personality science · 2023Article
- The Role of Perceived Risk in the Relationship Between Disgust Sensitivity and COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy.Cognitive therapy and research · 2023Article
- Mental Health Challenges during the COVID-19 Pandemic.Journal of clinical medicine · 2023Article
- Quantified multidimensional public sentiment characteristics on social media for public opinion management: Evidence from the COVID-19 pandemic.Frontiers in public health · 2023Article
- The role of the behavioural immune system on covid-19 lockdown attitudes: The relationship with authoritarianism and collectivism.Evolution, medicine, and public health · 2023Article
- Antenatal depression is associated with perceived stress, family relations, educational and professional status among women in South of China: a multicenter cross-sectional survey.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2023Article
9 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The 'behavioural immune system' is composed of mechanisms that evolved as a means of facilitating behaviours that minimized infection risk and enhanced fitness. Recent empirical research on human populations suggests that these mechanisms have unique consequences for many aspects of human sociality--including sexual attitudes, gregariousness, xenophobia, conformity to majority opinion and conservative sociopolitical attitudes. Throughout much of human evolutionary history, these consequences may have had beneficial health implications; but health implications in modern human societies remain unclear. This article summarizes pertinent ways in which modern human societies are similar to and different from the ecologies within which the behavioural immune system evolved. By attending to these similarities and differences, we identify a set of plausible implications-both positive and negative-that the behavioural immune system may have on health outcomes in contemporary human contexts. We discuss both individual-level infection risk and population-level epidemiological outcomes. We also discuss a variety of additional implications, including compliance with public health policies, the adoption of novel therapeutic interventions and actual immunological functioning. Research on the behavioural immune system, and its implications in contemporary human societies, can provide unique insights into relationships between fitness, sociality and health.
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