# Disgust, Distrust, and Xenodyskheria: Mapping the Emotional Landscape of Group Biases Before, During, and After the Pandemic

Nassim Elimari, Gilles Lafargue

► To cite this version:

Nassim Elimari, Gilles Lafargue. Disgust, Distrust, and Xenodyskheria: Mapping the Emotional Landscape of Group Biases Before, During, and After the Pandemic. NorthEastern Evolutionary Psychology Society (NEEPS) Conference 2025, Jun 2025, Atlantic City, United States. 2025, 10.13140/RG.2.2.18777.63845. [hal-05155141](https://hal.science/hal-05155141v1)

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Submitted on 9 Jul 2025

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# DISGUST, DISTRUST, AND XENODYSKHERIA
## MAPPING THE EMOTIONAL LANDSCAPE OF GROUP BIASES BEFORE, DURING, AND AFTER THE PANDEMIC

Nassim ELIMARI¹ (nassim.elimari@gmail.com); Gilles LAFARGUE¹

¹UNIVERSITY OF REIMS CHAMPAGNE-ARDENNE

## BACKGROUND

Throughout evolution, animals have fought a war against pathogens, not only with immune defenses, but also by dodging unnecessary battles. This disease-avoidance strategy lives on in the *Behavioral Immune System* (BIS): a network of psychological defenses tuned to cues of contamination like rot, maggots, or fecal matter. If reading those words made your stomach turn, that's the BIS at work: disgust is its core emotional driver, flagging threats before they reach the bloodstream. Over evolutionary time, the BIS extended its reach beyond biological threats to shape social dynamics: what began as avoidance of pathogen vectors has evolved into rejection of conspecific carriers.

## THE 'XENODYKSHERIA' HYPOTHESIS

The BIS triggers social rejection as a response to various signs of illness, but also seems to treat *foreignness* as *constagiousness*, an adaptive inference in ancestral ecologies where outgroup contact could introduce novel pathogens. This response, we argue, is distinct from xenophobia, classically framed as a product of fear, stress, or anxiety. We call this disgust-driven social rejection *"Xenodyskheria"*, from the ancient Greek *xenos* (ξένος) = stranger and *-dyskheria* (δυσχέρεια) = disgust or repugnance: a prejudice rooted in gut-level revulsion.

## A MORAL BUFFER IN THE BEHAVIORAL IMMUNE SYSTEM?

Through natural selection, the neural networks of disgust were repurposed to fuel moral cognition. Consistent with most evolutionary theories of cognition, moral disgust is likely more flexible, domain-general, and culturally adaptable than older subsystems of the BIS. We suggest moral disgust could act as a brake on the very system it arose from, tempering the more automatic exclusionary reflexes triggered by pathogen disgust. The result is a 'behavioral immune paradox', where the BIS pushes behavior in opposite directions: repelling outsiders, yet restraining our urge to reject.

## THE PRESENT STUDY

The COVID-19 pandemic was a natural test case. We examined how disgust, stress, and anxiety predicted prejudice before, during, and after the pandemic. We produced three hypotheses:

1. The *'Xenodyskheria' hypothesis*: disgust would be the strongest predictor of prejudice.

2. The *'Moral Buffer' hypothesis*: moral disgust would reduce prejudice.

3. The *'Contextual Xenodyskheria' hypothesis*: disgust's predictive power would increase during the pandemic and decrease afterwards.

## METHOD

## PARTICIPANTS

We compared three large samples across time:

* Pre-COVID: n = 895 repurposed from Leeuwen and Petersen (2018)

* Peak-COVID: n = 1542 recruited at the height of the pandemic ("Winter-Wave", Dec 2020-Jan2021)

* Post-COVID: n = 500 recruited the first winter after the official end of the pandemic (Dec2023-Jan2024)

## MATERIALS AND ANALYSES

* Outgroup prejudice was assessed *via* desire for social distance and callousness towards strangers.

* To avoid biasing responses from hypothesis transparency, we purposefully avoided the Perceived Vulnerability to Disease Scale due to its overt focus on disease fear. Instead, we used the Three Domains of Disgust Scale (Tybur et al., 2009), which measures pathogen, sexual, and moral disgust without explicitly invoking illness-related concerns.

* Stress and anxiety were assessed with the Depression, Stress, and Anxiety Scale (Lovibond & Lovibond, 1994), the only measure not included in Leeuwen and Petersen's original study (2018)

* Analyses included Multiple Regression Analyses and Structural Equation Modelling to isolate unique effects of each predictor.

## RESULTS

<figure><img src="image_2.png" /><figcaption>**Figure 1.** Beta coefficients (*p*<.05, **p*<.01, ***p*<.001) derived from structural equation modeling analyses showing the relationships between domains of disgust (i.e., behavioral immunity, in green), stress/anxiety (in blue), and outgroup prejudice before, during and after the COVID-19 pandemic</figcaption></figure>

## DISCUSSION

### KEY TAKEWAY

* Confirming the *'Xenodyskheria' hypothesis*, pathogen disgust predicted prejudice during and after the pandemic, while neither stress nor anxiety had any significant effect.

* Confirming the *'Moral Buffer' hypothesis*, moral disgust downregulated outgroup prejudice.

* The *'Contextual Xenodyskheria' hypothesis* yielded mixed results: *xenodyskheria* increased during the pandemic but also persisted post-COVID.

### LIMITATIONS

* Non-longitudinal design.

* Lack of stress/anxiety measures Pre-COVID.

* Self-report measures are sensitive to social desirability bias, likely underreporting prejudice.

### IMPLICATIONS AND FUTURE RESEARCH

* Future research should invest in implicit and physiological measures for more robust conclusions.

* Outgroup prejudice may stem from evolved disease-avoidance mechanisms, not just fear, stress, or intergroup anxiety → Models of outgroup prejudice need to account for *xenodyskheria*.

* Future research should explore how to harness moral disgust's power as a buffer (e.g., testing which moral values to feed it to better counteract xenodyskheria) → Perhaps the BIS itself already holds a viable and strong solution against its own exclusionary tendencies?

* While BIS activation may be context-dependent, its return to baseline is less so → Do pathogen threats leave a more enduring imprint on the BIS than previously assumed?

## REFERENCES

Lovibond, P. F., & Lovibond, S. H. (1995). The structure of negative emotional states: Comparison of the Depression Anxiety Stress Scales (DASS) with the Beck Depression and Anxiety Inventories. *Behaviour Research and Therapy*, 33(3), 335-343.

Tybur, J. M., Lieberman, D., & Griskevicius, V. (2009). Microbes, mating, and morality: individual differences in three functional domains of disgust. *Journal of Personality and Social Psychology*, 9(1), 103.

Van Leeuwen, F., & Petersen, M. B. (2018). The behavioral immune system is designed to avoid infected individuals, not outgroups. *Evolution and Human Behavior*, 39(2), 226-234.

Badcock, P. B., Friston, K. J., Ramstead, M. J., Ploeger, A., & Hohwy, J. (2019). The hierarchically mechanistic mind: an evolutionary systems theory of the human brain, cognition, and behavior. *Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience*, 19, 1319-1351.

Elimari, N., & Lafargue, G. (2020). Network neuroscience and the adapted mind: Rethinking the role of network theories in evolutionary psychology. *Frontiers in Psychology*, 11, 545632.