Journal of Ethology

, Volume 28, Issue 2, pp 345–351 | Cite as

Health and the avoidance of macroparasites: a preliminary cross-cultural study

Article
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Abstract

Some evolutionary explanations of cross-cultural differences propose that human personality is caused by pathogen stress. Both xenophobia and ethnocentrism evolved under conditions with high parasite prevalence. Further, inter-individual variation in disgust or fear of parasites is expected to be influenced by human health, where healthy people should express lower disgust sensitivity to parasites. We examined inter-individual variation of children’s fear, disgust and self-perceived danger between two distinct cultures differing in overall pathogen prevalence. We found that children were able to distinguish between disease-relevant and disease-irrelevant groups of invertebrates and that children in regions with high pathogen prevalence expressed greater fear, disgust and self-perceived danger of all animals, irrespective of disease threat. After controlling for confounding factors, better health of children was associated with lower perceived danger of disease-relevant animals. Gender differences were found only in conditions with low pathogen stress. Our results support the idea that cross-cultural differences in human perception of animals are mediated by pathogen threat. Further research is necessary to investigate causal relationship between human health and avoidance of potentially hazardous animals.

Keywords

Cross-cultural research Disgust Fear Health Human Parasites 
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Notes

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Val Curtis for her insightful comments on an earlier draft of the manuscript. Mark Schaller kindly provided us with historically available data for pathogen prevalence. Two anonymous referees provided helpful comments on earlier draft of this manuscript. Finally, we would like to thank Esma Usak for perspectives relating to health education on the questionnaires.

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Copyright information

© Japan Ethological Society and Springer 2009

Authors and Affiliations

  • Pavol Prokop
    • 1
    • 2
  • Muhammet Usak
    • 1
    • 3
  • Jana Fančovičová
    • 1
    • 2
  1. 1.Institute of ZoologySlovak Academy of SciencesBratislavaSlovakia
  2. 2.Department of BiologyUniversity of TrnavaTrnavaSlovakia
  3. 3.Department of Science Education, Faculty of EducationDumlupinar UniversityKutahyaTurkey

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