Consumption, contact and copulation: how pathogens have shaped human psychological adaptations

Disgust is an emotion intimately linked to pathogen avoidance. Building on prior work, we suggest disgust is an output of programmes that evolved to address three separate adaptive problems: what to eat, what to touch and with whom to have sex. We briefly discuss the architecture of these programmes...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B. Biological sciences 2018-07, Vol.373 (1751), p.20170203-20170203
Main Authors: Lieberman, Debra, Billingsley, Joseph, Patrick, Carlton
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adaptation
Avoidance
Avoidance behavior
Consumption
Contact pressure
Copulation
Disgust
Emotions
Evolution
Expected values
Information processing
Morality
Pathogen Avoidance
Pathogens
Psychology
Review
Sexual Disgust
Values
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Summary:Disgust is an emotion intimately linked to pathogen avoidance. Building on prior work, we suggest disgust is an output of programmes that evolved to address three separate adaptive problems: what to eat, what to touch and with whom to have sex. We briefly discuss the architecture of these programmes, specifying their perceptual inputs and the contextual factors that enable them to generate adaptive and flexible behaviour. We propose that our sense of disgust is the result of these programmes and occurs when information-processing circuitries assess low expected values of consumption, low expected values of contact or low expected sexual values. This conception of disgust differs from prior models in that it dissects pathogen-related selection pressures into adaptive problems related to consumption and contact rather than assuming just one pathogen disgust system, and it excludes moral disgust from the domain of disgust proper. Instead, we illustrate how low expected values of consumption and contact as well as low expected sexual values can be used by our moral psychology to provide multiple causal links between disgust and morality. This article is part of the Theo Murphy meeting issue ‘Evolution of pathogen and parasite avoidance behaviours’.
ISSN:0962-8436
1471-2970
DOI:10.1098/rstb.2017.0203