A range of studies have demonstrated that people implicitly treat out-groups as the carriers of pathogens and that considerable prejudice against out-groups is driven by concerns about pathogens. Yet the psychological categories that are involved and the selection pressures that underlie these categories remain unclear. A common view is that human pathogen-avoidance psychology is specifically adapted to avoid out-groups because of their potentially different pathogens. However, the series of studies reported here shows that there is no dedicated category for reasoning about out-groups in terms of pathogens. Specifically, a memory-confusion experiment conducted with two large-scale samples of Americans (one nationally representative) yielded strong, replicable evidence that healthy out-group members are represented using the same psychological category that is used to represent manifestly infected in-group members. This suggests that the link between out-group prejudice and pathogen concerns is a by-product of general mechanisms for treating any unfamiliar appearance as an infection cue.

中文翻译：

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健康的团体外成员在心理上表现为受感染的团体内成员

一系列研究表明，人们含蓄地将外群体视为病原体的携带者，而对外群体的相当大的偏见是由对病原体的担忧驱动的。然而，所涉及的心理类别以及这些类别背后的选择压力仍不清楚。一个普遍的观点是，人类回避病原体的心理特别适用于避免外部群体，因为它们可能具有不同的病原体。然而，这里报告的一系列研究表明，没有专门的类别可以根据病原体来推理外群。具体来说，对两个大规模美国人样本（一个全国代表）进行的记忆混淆实验产生了强烈的、可复制的证据表明，健康的组外成员使用与用于表示明显感染的组内成员相同的心理类别来表示。这表明外群体偏见和病原体担忧之间的联系是将任何不熟悉的外观视为感染线索的​​一般机制的副产品。