Publications by authors named "Joshua M Tybur"

Most Five-Factor Model (FFM) questionnaire items contain unique variance that is partly heritable, stable, and consensually observable, demonstrates consistent associations with age and sex, and predicts life outcomes beyond higher order factors. Extending these findings to the HEXACO model, we meta-analyzed single-item cross-rater agreement, heritability, and 2-year stability using samples from six countries. We analyzed raw item scores and their residual variance and adjusted the estimates for measurement unreliability.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Prepared learning accounts suggest that specialized learning mechanisms increase the retention of associations linked to ancestrally-prevalent threats. Few studies have investigated specialized aversion learning for pathogen threats. In four pre-registered studies (N's = 515, 495, 164, 175), we employed an evaluative conditioning procedure to test whether foods (versus non-foods) are more readily associated with negative content associated with pathogens than negative content not associated with pathogens.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Fundamental frequency ( ) affects social perceptions, with low male frequencies enhancing perceptions of men's strength and status, especially in societies with high homicide rates and competitive environments.
  • On the other hand, high female frequencies made women seem more flirtatious, particularly in societies with lower relational mobility and higher fears of relationship threats.
  • The study shows that the impact of on social perceptions varies significantly based on socioecological factors related to competition for status and mates across different cultures.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Fitouchi et al. persuasively argue against popular disgust-based accounts of puritanical morality. However, they do not consider alternative account of moral condemnation that is also based on the psychology of disgust.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

This article has been withdrawn at the request of the editor. The Publisher apologizes for any inconvenience this may cause. The full Elsevier Policy on Article Withdrawal can be found at https://www.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Third party punishment (TPP) is thought to be crucial to the evolution and maintenance of human cooperation. However, this type of punishment is often not rewarded, perhaps because punishers' underlying motives are unclear. We propose that the expression of moral emotions could solve this problem by advertising such motives.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

People vary both in their embrace of their society's traditions, and in their perception of hazards as salient and necessitating a response. Over evolutionary time, traditions have offered avenues for addressing hazards, plausibly resulting in linkages between orientations toward tradition and orientations toward danger. Emerging research documents connections between traditionalism and threat responsivity, including pathogen-avoidance motivations.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Over the past decade, evolutionary psychologists have proposed that many moral stances function to promote self-interests. At the same time, behavioral geneticists have demonstrated that many moral stances have genetic bases. We integrated these perspectives by examining how moral condemnation of recreational drug use relates to sexual strategy (i.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

A broad literature indicates that pathogen, sexual, and moral disgust sensitivity relate to, among other things, political attitudes, moral condemnation, and symptoms of psychopathology. Consequently, disgust sensitivity has been widely assessed across subfields of psychology. Yet, no work has examined whether self-reports in disgust sensitivity reflect systematic trait variation that is detectable by others, and the extent to which such variation is distinct from broader personality.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

People vary in their willingness to try new foods. This variation, which is most frequently measured using the Food Neophobia Scale (FNS; Pliner & Hobden, 1992), has been interpreted as unidimensional. In four studies (N's = 210, 306, 160, and 161), we 1) demonstrate that food neophobia varies across meat and plant dimensions, 2) explore the validity of a measure of meat and plant neophobia, and 3) test whether these food neophobia dimensions predict decisions to eat a novel food item (i.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

To understand the consequences of cleansing, Lee and Schwarz favor a grounded procedures perspective over recently developed disgust theory. We believe that this position stems from three errors: (1) interpreting cleansing effects as broader than they are; (2) not detailing the proximate mechanisms underlying disgust; and (3) not detailing adaptive function versus system byproducts when developing the grounded procedures perspective.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Are male and female immigrants viewed similarly or differently? Consistent with an evolutionary threat management perspective, we suggest that the answer to this question depends upon what types of threats immigrant groups are perceived as posing. In the present study, we compared attitudes toward male and female immigrants from either a violent ecology (e.g.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

A substantial body of research has illuminated psychological adaptations motivating pathogen avoidance, mechanisms collectively known as the behavioral immune system. Can knowledge about these mechanisms inform how people respond to widespread disease outbreaks, such as the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) [coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)] pandemic? We review evidence suggesting that the evolutionary history of the behavioral immune system, and the cues that activate it, are distinct in many ways from modern human experiences with pandemics. Moreover, the behaviors engaged by this system may have limited utility for combating pandemic diseases like COVID-19.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

We introduce the Special Issue on Disgust and Political Attitudes discussing the importance of understanding state and trait disgust, the innovative and transparent process by which registered reports and preregistered studies were chosen and funded, and the manuscripts that make up this special issue. This essay concludes by discussing future research directions in disgust and political attitudes, as well as the benefits of a transparent review process that avoids the "file drawer problem" of unpublished null findings.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The tendency to attend to and avoid cues to pathogens varies across individuals and contexts. Researchers have proposed that this variation is partially driven by immunological vulnerability to infection, though support for this hypothesis is equivocal. One key piece of evidence (Miller & Maner, 2011) shows that participants who have recently been ill-and hence may have a reduced ability to combat subsequent infection-allocate more attention to faces with infectious-disease cues than do participants who have not recently been ill.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Decades of research have shown that about half of individual differences in personality traits is heritable. Recent studies have reported that heritability is not fixed, but instead decreases across the life span. However, findings are inconsistent and it is yet unclear whether these trends are because of a waning importance of heritable tendencies, attributable to cumulative experiential influences with age, or because of nonlinear patterns suggesting Gene × Environment interplay.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Behavioral-immune-system research has illuminated how people detect and avoid signs of infectious disease. But how do we regulate exposure to pathogens that produce no symptoms in their hosts? This research tested the proposition that estimates of interpersonal value are used for this task. The results of three studies ( = 1,694), each conducted using U.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Across societies, humans punish norm violations. To date, research on the antecedents and consequences of punishment has largely relied upon agent-based modeling and laboratory experiments. Here, we report a longitudinal study documenting punishment responses to norm violations in daily life (k = 1507; N = 257) and test pre-registered hypotheses about the antecedents of direct punishment (i.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Multiple studies report that disgust-eliciting stimuli are perceived as salient and subsequently capture selective attention. In the current study, we aimed to better understand the nature of temporal attentional biases toward disgust-eliciting stimuli and to investigate the extent to which these biases are sensitive to contextual and trait-level pathogen avoidance motives. Participants (N = 116) performed in an emotional attentional blink task in which task-irrelevant disgust-eliciting, fear-eliciting, or neutral images preceded a target by 200, 500, or 800 ms (i.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Past research indicates that patient perceptions of surgeon warmth and competence influence treatment expectancies and satisfaction with treatment outcomes. Stereotypes have a powerful impact on impression formation. The present research explores stereotypes about surgeon warmth and competence and investigates the extent to which surgeon gender influences perceptions of female and male surgeons.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Researchers have proposed that intergroup prejudice is partially caused by behavioral immune system mechanisms. Across four studies (total N = 1,849), we used both experimental (pathogen priming) and individual differences (pathogen disgust sensitivity [PDS]) approaches to test whether the behavioral immune system influences prejudice toward immigrants indiscriminately (the generalized out-group prejudice hypothesis) or specifically toward immigrants from a pathogen-rich ecology (the origin-specific out-group prejudice hypothesis). Internal meta-analyses lend some support to both hypotheses.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Why is disgust sensitivity associated with socially conservative political views? Is it because socially conservative ideologies mitigate the risks of infectious disease, whether by promoting out-group avoidance or by reinforcing norms that sustain antipathogenic practices? Or might it be because socially conservative ideologies promote moral standards that advance a long-term, as opposed to a short-term, sexual strategy? Recent attempts to test these two explanations have yielded differing results and conflicting interpretations. Here, we contribute to the literature by examining the relationship between disgust sensitivity and political orientation, political party affiliation, and an often overlooked outcome-actual voter behavior. We focus on voter behavior and affiliation for the 2016 U.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

People vary in the degree to which they experience disgust toward-and, consequently, avoid-cues to pathogens. Prodigious work has measured this variation and observed that it relates to, among other things, personality, psychopathological tendencies, and moral and political sentiments. Less work has sought to generate hypotheses aimed at explaining why this variation exists in the first place, and even less work has evaluated how well data support these hypotheses.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF