What do people think diseases look, smell, sound, taste, and feel like?

What do people think diseases look, smell, sound, taste, and feel like? Josh Ackerman, Wilson Merrell, Soyeon Choi. Human Behavior and Evolution Society 31st annual meeting. Boston 2019. http://tiny.cc/aa1w6y

Abstract: Humans have basic five senses: sight, smell, sound, taste, and touch. These five senses help us perceive and navigate the world, enabling us to approach potential rewards and avoid imminent threats. In this study, we examined how people believe they use the five sensory modalities to detect an important environmental threat, the risk of infectious diseases. Using a fully within-subjects design, 300 participants read a scenario where they imagined a flu outbreak and thus needing to determine whether another person was sick or not. Participants ranked the five senses (sight, smell, sound, taste, touch) in terms of perceived effectiveness in detecting infection and how likely they would be to actually use each of the senses. Rankings of effectiveness and likelihood of use were similar, in the descending order of sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste. Participants’ expected emotional reactions, confidence in their disease-detection abilities, and individual differences in pathogen disgust and perceived vulnerability to disease were also examined. While the existing research has mainly focused on direct and indirect consequences of disease detection, this study provides interesting insights into people’s lay beliefs of the detection process itself.