Author: Ryan Blanchard           Major: Biology

Ryan Blanchard

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 and spring of 2021 which allowed us to compensate participants for completing our online survey and helped us recruit participants because of the incentive. I defended and passed my honors defense this spring of 2021.

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 in the first place 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 response. Such responses are strongly correlated with the emotion of disgust. Indeed, 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 than people preparing for careers without contact with patients who may be contagious. Additionally, other theories suggest that repeated exposure to disgust-evoking situations lowers people’s sensitivity as well. In my honors thesis project, I examined how medical professionals compare to the rest of the population in terms of their disgust sensitivity, and whether medical professionals demonstrate the previously documented association between disgust sensitivity and prejudice against people perceived as foreign.

Results from my honors thesis project support prior research that has evaluated disgust sensitivity, as well as expand that research in a new way.  We found that medical professionals had lower pathogen disgust than non-medical professionals, but the same pattern was not observed for other domains of disgust sensitivity (e.g., sexual disgust, moral disgust). We also found that medical professionals (practicing doctors and nurses) with higher frequencies of encounters with contagious people reported lower pathogen disgust than those with lower frequencies. This new research provides support that disgust sensitivity continues to be lower in medical professionals than the general public even after years of school and into their medical career.

Prior research has examined how the behavioral immune system can prompt some prejudicial attitudes toward people perceived to be foreign. These studies sampled mostly undergraduate students, while I investigated the possible differences between medical professionals and the average population. I found that medical professionals were more likely to favor the restriction of immigration, but this wasn’t related to their pathogen disgust. This could be because medical professionals may be more aware of the possible health-related risks of taking in immigrants. Additionally, medical professionals more so than control participants showed greater endorsement of health screenings for immigrants. Most importantly, for both groups and with no differences between groups, pathogen disgust was positively associated with more negative perceptions of the fictional immigrant group. These findings suggest the importance of examining factors that influence medical professionals’ perceptions of immigrants, and how these perceptions may get in the way of patient treatment.

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. 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.