The social impact of pathogen threat: How disease salience influences conformity

Abstract

Our human ancestors learned to use morphological deviations from the normal population to identify conspecific pathogen carriers and developed group normative practices in fighting local diseases. Modern conformity is still driven in part by disease avoidance. In this study, we tested the association between pathogen threat and conformity in three studies. A survey of 164 college students revealed that perceived vulnerability to disease uniquely predicted conformity tendencies. Results from the next two experiments showed that, in comparison to the control groups, participants primed by pathogen threat conformed more to majority views when evaluating abstract art drawings and rated themselves as more conforming on a questionnaire. There appears to be an evolved pathogen-avoidance mechanism that includes not only out-group avoidance strategies as have been found by other researchers, but also in-group approach strategies such as conformity. © 2012 Elsevier Ltd.