The relation between pathogen avoidance motivation and prejudice toward the poor

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FEDERAL STATE AUTONOMOUS EDUCATIONAL

INSTITUTION OF TERTIARY EDUCATION

«NATIONAL RESEARCH UNIVERSITY HIGHER SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS»

FACULTY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES

DEPARTMENT OF PSYCHOLOGY

Master's Program «Applied Social Psychology»

The relation between pathogen avoidance motivation and prejudice toward the poor

Burakova Anastasia

Moscow, 2019

Abstract

To solve the problem of prejudice toward low-status individuals and help this group of people integrate in a wider society, one needs to understand the basis of this prejudice. The current study aimed at shedding some light on this problem by studying whether pathogen avoidance motivation is connected with prejudice toward the poor. Participants were Russian-speaking individuals who lived most of their life in Russia. Regression and moderation analysis were used to test two hypotheses and it was found that stronger pathogen avoidance motivation leads to greater antipathy toward the poor. Apart from that, results show that higher income leads to greater antipathy toward the poor as well. However, higher income does not strengthen the relationship between pathogen avoidance motivation and prejudice toward the poor. These results show the need to change the perception of low-status individuals by others in order to help them integrate into society.

Introduction

In many cultures, there is prejudice toward the low-status groups that are associated with poverty like untouchables in India or gypsies in Europe (Lemieux &Pratto, 2003). People around the world are stigmatized because they possess such features of poverty as lack of hygieneand disease.

Lack of hygiene and disease are associated with pathogens that may be contagious to others. To eliminate a possibility of getting infected, people often avoid pathogens by avoiding the people who are associated with pathogens. Core disgust is what Hodson and Costello (2007) call concerns about protecting one's body from disease and infection. It is a rudimentary reaction that serves as a protection for the body from disease and infection. Pathogen threat evokes feelings of disgust, which is a predictor of negative intergroup attitudes (Hodson & Costello, 2007). Even though disgust-relevant concerns about contamination are often irrational and groundless, they influence the rejection of outgroups, especially socially deviant ones. Disgust calls for protection against getting infected so it instigates avoidance (Rozin et al., 2000).

If there is a salient risk of getting infected, people will be more avoidant of outgroup members because they will be scared of catching a disease. With the threat of getting infected being salient, people view the ambiguous others as disease-carrying in an exaggerated manner (Miller &Maner, 2012). When pathogen avoidance motivation is activated, people tend to perceive the ingroup and outgroup as more dissimilar (Reid et al., 2012). Pathogen avoidance motivation separates people of different nationalities, body types, sexual orientation, and economic status. The current research focuses on low-status individuals - poor people, and how they are perceived by others.

Research on beliefs about the poor showed that respondents were able to produce significantly more negative traits of the poor compared to middle class individuals (Cozzarelli, Wilkinson, &Tagler, 2001). Some of the most commonly named traits were «unpleasant», «dirty», and «immoral».

There is a lot of research supporting the idea that pathogen avoidance motivation contributes to prejudice and feelings of disgust towards individuals that do not carry any infectious diseases. Prejudice and feelings of disgust are often explained by perceptual anomalies in facial or body morphology (Murray & Schaller, 2016) but they can also be explained by lack of hygiene - what can often be seen among such low-status individuals as homeless people. This assumption that disgust is explained by perceptual anomalies and lack of hygiene is consistent with what Murray and Schaller (2016) call the smoke detector principle - such attributes activate “an underlying cue-detection system that is hypersensitive and prone to false alarms” (p.90). In their study, Miller &Maner (2012) call it “disease overperception bias” which is a heuristic that makes people who feel vulnerable to disease overperceive the danger that is caused to them by individuals displaying cues of infection. prejudice poor status motivation

A lot of social categories have been studied previously in terms of pathogen avoidance,- but there is not much research done on economic factors that build up different social categories that become stigmatized due to pathogen avoidance. For instance, income is an economic factor that distinguishes different groups of people depending on the size of their income. We know that there is pathogen avoidance motivation toward low-status individuals (Hodson & Costello, 2007).Whatstill needs to be found out is whether people in general are more avoidant of people with lesser income in other countries as well. The study done by Hodson and Costello (2007) included only English-Canadian participants. In this study, we will involve a Russian sample to look for evidence supporting or refuting previous findings. Therefore, the present gap in knowledge leads to the following research question: does stronger pathogen avoidance motivation result in greater antipathy toward the poor?

The study done by Hodson and Costello (2007) suggests that increased overall disgust sensitivity marginally predicts less liking of deviant and low-status groups. Increased overall disgust sensitivity is tightly connected with a strong pathogen avoidance motivation, and so, the latter can predict greater disliking of low-status outgroups.Therefore, the first hypothesis is that stronger pathogen avoidance motivation predicts greater antipathy toward the low-status individuals.

There has been some research done that found differences across groups in the extent to which they dislike the low-status individuals. For instance, one study concluded that people with higher social status (economic, occupational, or educational) are more likely to experience antipathy toward the poor (Clydesdale, 1999).

So how are people with higher social status different from the low-status individuals? Do people of different economic status actually have different attitudes toward the poor? Research shows that wealthier people have independent self-construals that may shape feelings of entitlement as well as inattention to the consequences of their actions on others (Piff et al., 2012). Also, the dissimilarity level between wealthy and poor individuals will be larger for those with a bigger income. These findings suggest that the relation between pathogen avoidance motivation and prejudice toward the poor (H1) is dependent on the social status of the perceiver.

Hypothesis 2: The relation between pathogen avoidance motivation and prejudice toward the low-status individuals is stronger among people that have higher personal income.

Here, we may see a moderation effect with wealth being the moderator of the relation between pathogen avoidance motivation and antipathy toward the low-status individuals.

Method

The study included a sample of 193 participants from Russia. The sample size was determined by the fact that hypothesis 2 involved a moderation analysis and Frazier et al. wrote that 180 is the minimum sample size for testing a hypothesis about moderation (Frazier et al., 2004). Participants were recruited online and had to complete a Qualtrics survey. The survey was presented in Russia and the recruitment targeted Russian speakers.

Three variables were measured in the cross-sectional design study. The dependent variable was prejudice towards low-status individuals. To measure it, I used feeling thermometers (Esses, Haddock, &Zanna, 1993). Participants were asked to rate how positive they felt towards the poor, the homeless, and the unemployed using a response scale ranging from 0° (extremely unfavorable) to 100° (extremely favorable), with higher scores indicating more positive attitudes. To make it appear that the survey measured attitudes toward several social groups, participants were also asked to rate how positive they felt towards the rich, Russians, and foreigners.

The independent variable - pathogen avoidance motivation - was assessed using the Three Domain Disgust Scale (Tybur et al., 2009). The scale included 21 items that asked participants to rate how disgusting they found each item on a scale from 0 (not at all disgusting) to 6 (extremely disgusting). This disgust scale measured three domains of disgust sensitivity - pathogen domain (e.g., “stepping on dog poop”), sexual domain (e.g., “watching a pornographic video”), and moral domain (e.g., “deceiving a friend”). Pathogen avoidance motivations was measured with the 7 items of the pathogen disgust scale.

The moderator - income - was measured using combined factual and subjective approach. For the factual part, two questions were asked. The first question “What is your personal income per month?”required an open-ended answer where participants had to state their income in rubles.Thesecond question was “What was your family income last month per person?” and also required an open-ended answer. For the subjective part, two questions were asked. The first question was “What statement describes financial standing of your family most accurately?” The following answer options were given: 1) we don't have enough money to buy food; 2) we have enough money to only buy food; 3) we have enough money for food and clothing but we have to save money for bigger purchases; 4) we can easily buy durable goods (refrigerator, television) but cannot afford buying an apartment; 5) we have enough money to buy whatever we want (Russian Federal State Statistics Service, 2003). This is a standard measure in Russia that was developed by Russian Federal State Statistics Service, the governmental statistics agency in Russia. The second question was “How would you evaluate your current family financial standing?” with the answers ranging on a 5-point scale from “very good” to “very bad” (Russian Public Opinion Research Center - one of Russia's leading sociological and market research companies).

Data analysis

To test hypothesis 1 (stronger pathogen avoidance motivation predicts greater antipathy toward the low-status individuals), regression analysis was used in order to estimate the relationship between pathogen avoidance motivation and antipathy toward the low-status individuals.

Moderation analysis tested hypothesis 2 (the relation between pathogen avoidance motivation and prejudice toward the low-status individuals is stronger among people that have higher personal income).It allowedto assess if income moderated the relationship between pathogen avoidance motivation and prejudice towards the low-status individuals. I conducted a multiple linear regression to examine for moderation. The independent variables of the regression were pathogen avoidance motivation, income, and the interaction between pathogen avoidance motivation and income. The first modelincluded as predictors pathogen avoidance motivation, income and control variables (age, gender). Then, the interaction was created by multiplying pathogen avoidance motivation and income together after having centered them to have a mean of zero. Then, another model was computed that also included this interaction term as a predictor. The dependent variable of the regression was prejudice towards the low-status individuals. The moderation would be supported if the interaction was significant.

Results

Data analysis was performed using SPSS 23. Before testing the hypotheses, primary analysis was conducted in order to check whether the data was suitable for regression analysis. First, I checked the reliability of my dependent variable using Cronbach's б and tested for missing values using Little's MCAR test. Second, I measured the means of my variables using descriptive statistics. Third, I correlated the dependent variables using Pearson r test which is used to detect any significant relations between the variables.

For my research, I recorded 230 responses in Qualtrics survey. I performed Missing Value Analysis and excluded 37 participants who completed the survey to less than 95%. As a result, my final sample consists of 193 participants living in Russia, with 59.6% of females, Mage=29.7, SD=10.3.

Table 1

Descriptive Statistics

To test for missing values, I performed Little's MCAR test and found it to be not significant (p = .153) which means that the values are missing at random. Thus, further research could be performed.

The dependent variable scale, “prejudice towards low-status individuals”, was checked for reliability. The scale was constructed of three questions that asked for participants' attitude towards poor, unemployed and homeless individuals. Cronbach's б of the scale is .73, the scale is sufficiently reliable.

The “income” scale was constituted of four questions asking about participant's personal income, family income per person, whether the family could afford buying certain things, and subjective evaluation of family material. For the “income” scale, before standardizing I reversed the question: “How would you evaluate your current family financial standing?” In the survey, it was a negatively worded question where 1 was “very good” and 5 was “very bad”. Cronbach's б of the scale is .69 which is sufficient for my research. The mean score of personal income per month was 69500 rubles (approximately 870 euros), SD = 92764 which is approximately 1150 euros. The mean score of family income per person was 60000 rubles (approximately 750 euros), SD = 56114 rubles or 700 euros.

The “pathogen avoidance motivation” scale consists of 7 questions from Three Domain Disgust scale on the pathogen domain. The scale was found reliable with a Cronbach's б of .74.The mean score of pathogen avoidance 3.6 out of 6, SD = .96.

Furthermore, the relationships between all the dependent variables were analyzed using Pearson's correlation coefficient. Gender correlated with both pathogen avoidance motivation (p = .001) and prejudice toward low-status individuals (p = .001). Females were more pathogen avoidant and felt more antipathy towards the poor. Age correlated with pathogen avoidance motivation (p = .026) and prejudice toward los-status individuals as well (p = .017). The older the person was, the less pathogen avoidance motivation they had and better attitudes towards the poor they held. Two questions from the `income' scale correlated with pathogen avoidance motivation. The higher was income per person in family (p = .012), and subjective evaluation of family financial standing (p = .044), the stronger the participant felt pathogen avoidance motivation. Pathogen avoidance motivation correlated negatively with prejudice toward low-status individuals (p = .001).

Table 2

I performed Regression analysis to test the hypotheses. I found that pathogen avoidance motivation negatively predicted attitudes towards low-status individuals (p<.05) which meant that the stronger was pathogen avoidance motivation, the worse were the attitudes towards low-status individuals (Table 3). Thus, I can declare that my first hypothesis is confirmed.

Moreover, gender, age, pathogen avoidance motivation and income all predicted antipathy towards the poor. Material status negatively predicted attitudes towards the low-status individuals. In other words, the higher was the material status of people, the worse attitudes towards low-status individuals they had.

Table 3

Third model with gender, age, pathogen avoidance motivation and material status explain approximately 11% of variance in the outcome variable.

Moderation analysis was performed using Andrew F. Hayes PROCESS version 3. When the interaction effect between material status and pathogen avoidance motivation was added, the relationship was found to be not significant. Moderation analysis showed no interaction effect. Thus, the second hypothesis was not confirmed. I can conclude that the relation between pathogen avoidance motivation and prejudice toward the low-status individuals is not stronger among people that have higher personal income as it does not have a significant effect. This means that income and pathogen avoidance motivation are separate determinants of prejudice toward the low-status individuals.

Discussion

This research investigated whether stronger pathogen avoidance motivation results in greater antipathy towards the poor and whether that relationship becomes stronger with a higher income. Relationship between pathogen avoidance motivation and prejudice towards low-status individuals was not extensively studied before so this current research aimed at starting to close this knowledge gap. Previous research shows that low-status groups are associated with poverty and people are prejudiced toward them (Lemieux &Pratto, 2003). This current research supports this notion as it shows there is prejudice toward low-status individuals as they are associated with pathogens.

After conducting my analysis to test my first hypothesis, I found that pathogen avoidance motivation is connected to antipathy towards the poor. By pathogen avoidance motivation I meant a motive to stay separated from an infectious object or the one that is only perceived as infectious. By low-status individuals I meant those people who have low income, don't have a job or a home. There was found connection between the motive to avoid pathogens and the antipathy towards poor, unemployed or homeless. In other words, those who have a strong pathogen avoidance motivation, have lower attitudes towards the low-status individuals as they perceive them as carrying disease. This finding is in line and it extends previous research that showed that pathogen avoidance motivation results in disgust and lower attitudes (Hodson & Costello, 2007).

My second hypothesis was not supported by the research. It was found that even though material status predicted greater antipathy towards the low-status individuals, it did not strengthen the relationship between pathogen avoidance motivation and prejudice towards the poor. From this finding, I can conclude that income and pathogen avoidance motivation work separately in determining the attitudes towards the poor.Previous research has already showed that higher-status individuals experience more antipathy towards the poor (Clydesdale, 1999) and this current study complements it by saying that higher income is enough to produce greater antipathy.

The reason of no interaction effect might be because for wealthier people, it is not pathogen avoidance motivation that leads to antipathy towards the poor but other mechanisms in their mind. For example, it might be that rich people believe that poor are lazy which is a common stereotype. Perceiving them as being lazy, might cause negative feelings and distance them from the poor.

Prejudice towards low-status groups can indeed occur due to pathogen avoidance motivation as poor people are seen as dirty and carrying a disease. Pathogen avoidance motivation has a negative effect on people because people do not actually carry an infectious disease but are only perceived so because of their appearance or stereotypical prejudice towards the group they belong to.

People high on pathogen avoidance motivation start to avoid the poor and not allow them to integrate successfully into society. If low-status individuals are looking for a job or a home, antipathy towards them might cause rejection in people high in pathogen avoidance motivation. This finding extends previous research that showed that pathogen avoidance motivation creates a greater feeling of dissimilarity between one's in-group and out-group (Reid et al., 2012).

Implications

With this study, I contributed to the current state of the methodological, theoretical and practical aspects related to pathogen avoidance motivation and prejudice towards the poor.

Regarding methodological contribution, the questions determining attitudes towards low-status individuals that asked about poor, homeless and unemployed individuals, showed to form into a reliable scale and could be used in further research.

Regarding theoretical contribution, I started to close the knowledge gap in the topic of relationship of pathogen avoidance motivation and prejudice towards the poor. There is no extensive research on this topic and no research of it at all in the Russian setting. By conducting my research in Russia, I introduced a new context and found that as well as in Western countries, in Russia pathogen avoidance motivation also predicts worse attitudes towards low-status groups, and poor people more specifically. Moreover, income was found to predict greater antipathy towards the poor and that finding develops on the previous knowledge about high-status people as feeling more entitled and exceptional(Piff et al., 2012).

Regarding practical implication, I showed that low-status individuals are indeed seen as carrying pathogens so for the sake of society, governmental programs might be started in order to change the perception of low-status individuals. They could come in forms of social marketing campaigns that would send a message out that low-status does not mean infection. That will help them not be avoided by many and give a chance to better integrate in community. Previous research is complemented by my findings as it showed that disgust results in avoidance (Rozin et al., 2000) and this research follows up on that topic.

Limitations

This work has several limitations which should be mentioned. First of all, reliability for the “income” scale was found to be not optimal. While based on the data from Russian Public Opinion Research Center and Russian Federal State Statistics Service, the questions did not form a strong scale while two of them were working well separately. Future research could estimate the correlations with scales with better reliability. For future research in Russia, another choice of questions might be chosen in addition to those other two.

Another weakness of this research is a rather homogeneous sample resulting in restriction of range. This is, for a variable the variation in sample did not reflect the full range of the variable in the population. This has probably resulted in underestimating the effects of income.

Conclusion

Results of this study clearly show that stronger pathogen avoidance motivation predicts greater prejudice toward the low-status individuals. It also found that material status predicts antipathy towards the poor as well. In other words, the richer a person is, the more antipathy they feel towards the poor. My results show that the relation between pathogen avoidance motivation and prejudice toward the low-status individuals is not necessarily stronger among people that have higher personal income. Instead, wealthier people might have other reasons for feeling antipathy towards the low-status individuals that are not connected with pathogen avoidance motivation. These findings give ground to the future research for further investigation of the topic.

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