Objective

Recent findings suggest crowd salience heightens pathogen-avoidant motives, serving to reduce individuals’ infection risk through interpersonal contact. Such experiences may similarly facilitate the identification, and avoidance, of diseased conspecifics. The current experiment sought to replicate and extend previous crowding research.

Methods

In this experiment, we primed participants at two universities with either a crowding or control experience before having them evaluate faces manipulated to appear healthy or diseased by indicating the degree to which they would want to interact with them.

Results

Crowding-primed participants reported a more heightened preferences for healthy faces than control-primed participants. Additionally, crowd salience reduced aversion toward healthy faces but did not heighten aversion to diseased faces.

Conclusion

Results suggest crowding appears to heighten tolerance for health cues given the heightened proximal threat of infections through interpersonal contact within crowded environments. Conversely, this work extends previous findings by indicating this preference is not rooted in an aversion to cues of poor health. We frame findings from a threat management perspective in understanding how crowding fosters sensitivity toward pathogenic threats.

中文翻译：

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人群显着性提高了对健康面部特征的耐受性

 客观的

最近的研究结果表明，人群的显着性增强了病原体回避动机，有助于降低个人通过人际接触感染的风险。这样的经历可能同样有助于识别和避免患病的同种动物。当前的实验试图复制和扩展之前的拥挤研究。

 方法

在这个实验中，我们为两所大学的参与者提供了拥挤或控制的体验，然后让他们通过表明他们想要与这些面孔互动的程度来评估被操纵以显得健康或患病的面孔。

 结果

拥挤引发的参与者报告说，与控制引发的参与者相比，他们对健康面孔的偏好更高。此外，人群显着性减少了对健康面孔的厌恶，但并没有增加对患病面孔的厌恶。

 结论

结果表明，鉴于拥挤环境中人际接触带来的感染近端威胁增加，拥挤似乎提高了对健康线索的耐受性。相反，这项工作扩展了之前的发现，表明这种偏好并不是源于对健康状况不佳的厌恶。我们从威胁管理的角度构建研究结果，以了解拥挤如何增强对致病威胁的敏感性。