Psycho-behavioral Immune System And Social Trust

Disease,a lingering shadow of human evolution,is our chief rival for survival and reproduction,Over the course of evolution,diseases have killed more people than all the other causes combined.As a result,humans have evolved biological and psychological immune systems to protect themselves against disease threats.Recently,more and more research on the behavioral immune system has shown that there may be a close relationship between the behavioral immune system and the biological immune system,and the state of one side may affect the other.In addition,the behavioral immune system has been shown to affect all aspects of human social behavior,especially cooperative behavior.Therefore,Berg’s classic trust game paradigm was adopted in this study to investigate whether individuals with different biological immunoactivity levels have different behavioral immune activities and have an impact on individuals’ generalized social trust.In the study 1,body temperature was used as the index to investigate the influence of individual’s biological immune function on general trust in the natural environment.The results showed that in the natural environment,the biological immune function was proportional to the general social trust,and the function was mediated by the behavioral immune activity.Study 2 examined the relationship between recent somatic states,biological immunity,and generalized social trust.The results showed that there was a positive correlation between recent somatic status and generalized social trust,and this effect was also mediated by behavioral immune activity.And a recent study showed that taking Nonsteroidal Antiinflammatory Drugs,NSAIDs can down-regulate part of an individual’s biological immune function,leading to a stronger incentive to avoid disease.Therefore,study 3 considered whether this effect still existed after the use of drugs to artificially regulate the biological immune activity of individuals.The results showed that,after taking aspirin,biological immune activity decreased and general trust decreased,and this effect was still mediated by the behavioral immune system.These findings provide further evidence of a complex interaction between thebiological and behavioral immune systems.It has been preliminarily shown that some with the behavioral immune system as the intermediary,which has enriched the psychological research on the behavioral immune system.Furthermore,the results also suggest that drugs that partially regulate individual biological indicators may also have an impact on individual psychology and behavior,which calls for further exploration.