ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2016
Parasite stress and pathogen avoidance relate to distinct dimensions of political ideology across 30 nations.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 71 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
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.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
71 citing papers in PubMed.
- Trial
- Polish Women's Sexual Strategies in Mate Retention: Initiating Sex, Faking Orgasms, and Performing Oral Sex in Response to Mate Value Discrepancy-Evidence from a Preregistered Study.Archives of sexual behavior · 2026Article
- Article
- Oral Sex May Serve as Low Mate Value Compensation Among Men: Evidence from a Pre-registered Study.Archives of sexual behavior · 2025Article
- Pathogen stress heightens sensorimotor dimensions in the human collective semantic space.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- Ecological Threats and Cultural Systems : Epidemics and Natural Disasters Do Not Predict Collectivism.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2024Article
- Political Attitudes and Disease Threat: Regional Pathogen Stress Is Associated With Conservative Ideology Only for Older Individuals.Personality & social psychology bulletin · 2024Article
- Do Experimental Manipulations of Pathogen Avoidance Motivations Influence Conformity?Personality & social psychology bulletin · 2024Article
- Anger and disgust shape judgments of social sanctions across cultures, especially in high individual autonomy societies.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Imprint of ancestral and modern threats in human mind - experience of fear, disgust, and anger.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Italian validation of the body odor disgust scale.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2024Article
- Beyond the surface: accounting for confounders in understanding the link between collectivism and COVID-19 pandemic in the United States.BMC public health · 2023Article
- How much cultural variation around the globe is explained by ecology?Proceedings. Biological sciences · 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
- Pandemic elevates sensitivity to moral disgust but not pathogen disgust.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Greater traditionalism predicts COVID-19 precautionary behaviors across 27 societies.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Love and affectionate touch toward romantic partners all over the world.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Cooperative and conformist behavioural preferences predict the dual dimensions of political ideology.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Neighbours and relatives: accounting for spatial distribution when testing causal hypotheses in cultural evolution.Evolutionary human sciences · 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
11 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
42 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
People who are more avoidant of pathogens are more politically conservative, as are nations with greater parasite stress. In the current research, we test two prominent hypotheses that have been proposed as explanations for these relationships. The first, which is an intragroup account, holds that these relationships between pathogens and politics are based on motivations to adhere to local norms, which are sometimes shaped by cultural evolution to have pathogen-neutralizing properties. The second, which is an intergroup account, holds that these same relationships are based on motivations to avoid contact with outgroups, who might pose greater infectious disease threats than ingroup members. Results from a study surveying 11,501 participants across 30 nations are more consistent with the intragroup account than with the intergroup account. National parasite stress relates to traditionalism (an aspect of conservatism especially related to adherence to group norms) but not to social dominance orientation (SDO; an aspect of conservatism especially related to endorsements of intergroup barriers and negativity toward ethnic and racial outgroups). Further, individual differences in pathogen-avoidance motives (i.e., disgust sensitivity) relate more strongly to traditionalism than to SDO within the 30 nations.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.