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What people believe about detecting infectious disease using the senses
Do you believe you can tell if people are sick with infectious diseases by looking at, listening to, or smelling them? Research on pathogen detection and avoidance suggests that perceivers respond with caution both to true signs of infection and to cues only heuristically associated with infection t...
Autores principales: | , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V.
2020
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7569475/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35098184 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cresp.2020.100002 |
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author | Ackerman, Joshua M. Merrell, Wilson N. Choi, Soyeon |
author_facet | Ackerman, Joshua M. Merrell, Wilson N. Choi, Soyeon |
author_sort | Ackerman, Joshua M. |
collection | PubMed |
description | Do you believe you can tell if people are sick with infectious diseases by looking at, listening to, or smelling them? Research on pathogen detection and avoidance suggests that perceivers respond with caution both to true signs of infection and to cues only heuristically associated with infection threat. But what do perceivers actually believe about the effectiveness and use of specific sensory modalities for infection detection? In several studies, U.S. participants reported perceptions of effectiveness and likelihood of using each of the major senses to identify infection threat in two types of targets: people and food. Results revealed prioritization of sight and sound with person targets and prioritization of sight and smell with food targets. These patterns appear consistent with the use of “safe senses” (avoidance of cues involving high perceived transmission risk). Beliefs about sensory use also varied depending on the specific feature being examined, with different patterns of sensory beliefs associated with evaluation of pathogenic danger than with evaluation of desirability and fit with normative standards. We discuss these lay beliefs in the context of recent calls for descriptive research in psychology as well as their implications for current and future work on the behavioral immune system. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-7569475 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2020 |
publisher | The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-75694752020-10-19 What people believe about detecting infectious disease using the senses Ackerman, Joshua M. Merrell, Wilson N. Choi, Soyeon Current Research in Ecological and Social Psychology Article Do you believe you can tell if people are sick with infectious diseases by looking at, listening to, or smelling them? Research on pathogen detection and avoidance suggests that perceivers respond with caution both to true signs of infection and to cues only heuristically associated with infection threat. But what do perceivers actually believe about the effectiveness and use of specific sensory modalities for infection detection? In several studies, U.S. participants reported perceptions of effectiveness and likelihood of using each of the major senses to identify infection threat in two types of targets: people and food. Results revealed prioritization of sight and sound with person targets and prioritization of sight and smell with food targets. These patterns appear consistent with the use of “safe senses” (avoidance of cues involving high perceived transmission risk). Beliefs about sensory use also varied depending on the specific feature being examined, with different patterns of sensory beliefs associated with evaluation of pathogenic danger than with evaluation of desirability and fit with normative standards. We discuss these lay beliefs in the context of recent calls for descriptive research in psychology as well as their implications for current and future work on the behavioral immune system. The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. 2020-08 2020-10-19 /pmc/articles/PMC7569475/ /pubmed/35098184 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cresp.2020.100002 Text en © 2020 The Author(s) Since January 2020 Elsevier has created a COVID-19 resource centre with free information in English and Mandarin on the novel coronavirus COVID-19. The COVID-19 resource centre is hosted on Elsevier Connect, the company's public news and information website. Elsevier hereby grants permission to make all its COVID-19-related research that is available on the COVID-19 resource centre - including this research content - immediately available in PubMed Central and other publicly funded repositories, such as the WHO COVID database with rights for unrestricted research re-use and analyses in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for free by Elsevier for as long as the COVID-19 resource centre remains active. |
spellingShingle | Article Ackerman, Joshua M. Merrell, Wilson N. Choi, Soyeon What people believe about detecting infectious disease using the senses |
title | What people believe about detecting infectious disease using the senses |
title_full | What people believe about detecting infectious disease using the senses |
title_fullStr | What people believe about detecting infectious disease using the senses |
title_full_unstemmed | What people believe about detecting infectious disease using the senses |
title_short | What people believe about detecting infectious disease using the senses |
title_sort | what people believe about detecting infectious disease using the senses |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7569475/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35098184 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cresp.2020.100002 |
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