Disease avoidance trade-offs: People who are more interested in seeking new romantic partners (e.g., young men) may be less inclined to socially distance and be more at risk of pathogen transmission

Disease Avoidance Motives Trade-Off Against Social Motives, Especially Mate-Seeking, to Predict Social Distancing: Evidence From the COVID-19 Pandemic. Pelin Gul et al. Social Psychological and Personality Science, October 3, 2021. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/19485506211046462

Abstract: A range of studies have sought to understand why people’s compliance with social distancing varied during the COVID-19 pandemic. Recent theory suggests that pathogen avoidance behavior is based not only on perceived risk but on a trade-off between the perceived costs of pathogen exposure and the perceived benefits of social contact. We hypothesized that compliance with social distancing may therefore be explained by a trade-off between pathogen avoidance and various social motives such as mate-seeking. Two studies conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic showed that social distancing was positively associated with disease avoidance motives but negatively associated with social motives, especially mating motives. These associations remained after controlling for predictors identified by previous research, including risk perception and personality. Findings indicate that people who are more interested in seeking new romantic partners (e.g., young men) may be less inclined to socially distance and be more at risk of pathogen transmission.

Keywords: COVID-19, infectious disease prevention, social distancing, mate-seeking, disease avoidance

General Discussion

We hypothesized that adherence to social distancing and hygiene behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic is the result of a trade-off between motives to avoid infection and social motives. As expected, disease avoidance motives were positively associated, and mating motives negatively associated, with adherence to social distancing and hygiene behavior in two studies. However, other social motives, namely group affiliation and concerns about social exclusion, were not associated with social distancing or hygiene behavior. Moreover, after conducting regression analysis to control for a range of individual differences (e.g., personality and general risk perception), disease avoidance motives were the only consistent positive predictor, and mating motives were the only significant negative predictor, of social distancing. Overall, these findings suggest that mating motives are the most important of the social motives we measured in shaping social distancing behavior.

Mating motives and disease avoidance motives vary across sex and age (Ko et al., 2019). We therefore also explored whether the trade-off between these motives could be related to findings that men and young people adhere less with social distancing. We explored our hypothesis regarding age differences in both studies. But, due to small sample size of men in Study 1, we could explore our hypothesis regarding gender differences only in Study 2. Regarding age differences, indirect effects analyses in Study 1 revealed that only disease avoidance motives was associated with younger (vs. older) peoples’ compliance with social distancing, whereas in Study 2, consistent with our trade-off suggestion, younger peoples’ lower compliance with social distancing was associated with both their lower disease avoidance motives and their higher mate-seeking motives. The nonsignificant indirect effect via mating motives (SOI) in Study 1 could be due to the sample being predominantly women, who on average have lower desire for casual sex than men. Regarding sex differences, Study 2 similarly showed that men’s (vs. women’s) social distancing was associated with their lower disease avoidance and higher mate-seeking motives. Despite the sample size limitation in Study 1, these findings support the hypothesis that the trade-off between disease avoidance and mate-seeking shapes social distancing behavior, which can in turn shape demographic patterns of adherence with social distancing rules.

Following hygiene guidelines is not subject to the disease avoidance and mating trade-off to the same extent as social distancing because, compared to social distancing (e.g., staying at home) hygiene (e.g. hand washing) interferes less with social contact. This may explain why, in Study 2, adherence with social distancing was associated with mate-seeking motives but not with hygiene practices in the regression analyses. In both studies, affiliation motives were not as strongly associated with social distancing as mating motives were. One possible reason is that compared to mating, nonromantic socializing may be more easily satisfied while socially distancing via, for example, social media and virtual meeting platforms.

One limitation is that the two measures of mating motives we employed were not equally predictive across Studies 1 and 2. In Study 1, regression analysis revealed that socio-sexuality (SOI) was the only significant negative predictor of social distancing, whereas in Study 2, the Mate-Seeking Scale from FSMI was the only significant negative predictor. It could be that cultural or linguistic differences might explain this discrepancy, but future research would be needed to see if the discrepancy replicates with other samples. Regardless, in both studies, both mate-seeking motives and SOI negatively correlated with social distancing, and in both studies, one of these two mating motive measures was the only significant negative predictor after controlling for multiple other individual difference variables in regression analyses.

Our findings have important theoretical implications. It is well-documented that some individuals are more “disgust sensitive” than others—experiencing a stronger emotional response to pathogen cues (Haidt et al., 1994; Tybur et al., 2009). This emotional response has been theorized to motivate avoidance of certain objects and people heuristically associated with disease (Curtis et al., 2004; Faulkner et al., 2004; Shook et al., 2019). The present research emphasizes that avoidance behavior can be better explained when competing motives are also taken into account. Recent perspectives on the functioning of the human behavioral immune system (Tybur & Lieberman, 2016) and human fundamental social motives (Kenrick et al., 2010) have emphasized that pathogen avoidance motives and behavior are the outcome of a trade-off between the costs of pathogen exposure and the costs of avoiding pathogen exposure. Our findings extend these accounts by emphasizing the importance of mating motives in the trade-off with pathogen avoidance and by showing that the trade-off can explain social distancing behavior in addition to other outputs such as affective responses (Case et al., 2006) and discomfort with physical contact (Tybur et al., 2020).

Our findings also have implications for the design of policies and interventions to promote social distancing adherence. People who are more interested in seeking romantic partners (e.g., young men) may find it harder to follow social distancing rules and be more likely to spread pathogens. Our research may inform policy makers to increase commitment to help specific groups of people (e.g. young people) to manage competing motives to comply with infectious disease prevention behaviors. One avenue could be to develop public health campaigns to encourage people to fulfill their mating motives while maintaining social distancing, for example, by using virtual romantic or sexual interactions (see, e.g., British Columbia Center for Disease Control, n.d.; Dutch National Institute for Health and Environment, n.d.). In sum, we hope that our research will help to inform policy makers and the general public to address competing motives between adhering between infectious disease prevention behaviors and affiliative motives. Eventually, this may help to establish cultural and social practices whereby infectious diseases can be kept at a safe distance while at the same time helping people to remain intimately close.