Hello, my name is Ryan Blanchard and I am a Biology major. I am a Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences honors student. In the fall of 2019, I started working with Dr. Anastasia Makhanova in the department of psychological science. We received the honors research grant for the fall of 2020 which allowed us to launch our study. In the spring of 2021, I will be completing my honors thesis, taking the MCAT, and applying to medical schools.

Prior research proposes that people have a set of psychological processes (termed the behavioral immune system) that help them avoid sources of illness and complement the physiological immune system to protect the human body from pathogenic infections. The physiological immune system combats pathogens that have already entered the human body. The physiological immune system is not perfect, it is metabolically costly and can even cause disease after infection due to problems associated with inflammation. On the other hand, the behavioral immune system functions to prevent a pathogen from possibly entering the body through avoidant behaviors and attitudes. Behaviors such as avoiding close contact with a person coughing may be done consciously or unconsciously as part of the behavioral immune system. The activation of the behavioral immune system is strongly correlated with the emotion of disgust. Research has shown that people who have higher disgust sensitivity are more likely to show avoidant responses and attitudes compared to people who have lower disgust sensitivity. However, the behavioral immune system is not always accurate and can be compared to a smoke detector. A smoke detector goes off both to alert people of an imminent danger of a fire and when someone burned a couple of slices of toast.  Similarly, the behavioral immune system may trigger an avoidance reaction both when someone is actually sick and when someone just looks or behaves “different.”  These smoke detector errors are said to exist because having one’s house be on fire or of associating with someone who has an infectious illness is more dangerous than the alternative. Studying these errors is a focal point in research on the behavioral immune system.

Prior research has demonstrated that the behavioral immune system may cause some prejudicial attitudes against people who are perceived as foreign. That is, when people’s behavioral immune system is active, people may display prejudice or discriminate against people who they perceive as foreign. Most of this research was done by universities with undergraduate students as participants. Our research examines the behavioral immune system and resulting prejudices among medical professionals. Research has shown that people preparing for a career in medicine have a lower sensitivity to disgust and other theories suggest that repeated exposure to disgust-evoking situations lowers people’s sensitivity as well. In my honors thesis project, I am examining how medical professionals compare to the rest of the population in terms of their disgust sensitivity, and whether medical professionals demonstrate the documented association between disgust sensitivity and prejudice against people perceived as foreign.

My interest in this topic goes back to the fall of 2019 when I took social psychology with Dr. Makhanova. During one of the lectures, she presented her research on the behavioral immune system. I went to her office hours and expressed my interest in her research and eventually joined the Spark Lab. For this study, another undergraduate student, Allen Lambert, and I joined together to create one survey to send out to participants. We worked together along with Dr. Makhanova to come up with ideas for our topics and conducted a pilot test to provide some validity for our measures before we started the main survey. An interesting challenge we faced was that our survey kept getting attacked by online bots taking advantage of the gift card incentive for taking the survey, so participant recruitment was more difficult than we expected.