Kaitlyn White

[Elias Acevedo @Lucidly_Elias]

New paper on the psychology of thermoregulation with brilliant co-authors @kaypeathebee and @LaithAlShawaf.

Many thanks to @JoeAlcockMD and Nathan Morris for their helpful comments.

Summary and (open-access) link below 🧵

[Elias Acevedo @Lucidly_Elias]

@Koengeron Crucially, there’s no way for someone to know at what point the costs of some behavior are greater than the costs of pathogen exposure if they aren’t already tracking the relative level of threat that a potential pathogen poses.

Does that make sense?

[Elias Acevedo @Lucidly_Elias]

@Koengeron Consider someone who is starving, but the only food they have access to is covered in mold. At some critical threshold, their hunger will override their disgust, and they will eat the moldy food.

[Elias Acevedo @Lucidly_Elias]

An evolutionary logic can in principle predict both these findings:

If the costs of violating social norms are greater than the costs of potential pathogen exposure in that Indian ecology, then an evo perspective would predict people should risk the latter to prevent the former.

Norm violations can in fact be a huge threat to one’s livelihood, same as pathogens—the question is which one is a bigger threat in any given context.

[Elias Acevedo @Lucidly_Elias]

@Koengeron Yes—responses should depend on competing costs and benefits, which will vary across ecologies. That’s not inconsistent with what we found here, which is that disgust systematically tracks the relative level of threat.

[Elias Acevedo @Lucidly_Elias]

Fresh off the press! (DM me for a pdf)

Existing research demonstrates that people react with disgust to pathogenic stimuli compared to non-pathogenic stimuli, but there has been a lack of research examining whether people are equipped with a more finely graded disgust response.

Across three experiments involving participants from the United States and India (total n=1,333), @kaypeathebee, myself, @LaithAlShawaf, and David M.G. Lewis tested the Threat-Dependent Disgust hypothesis: Do people discriminate between pathogen threats of different magnitudes and react with more disgust toward pathogen threats of a greater magnitude?

In Study 1 (n=428), we tested the prediction that people would be more disgusted by a pathogen threat touching their hand relative to their foot, given that touching a pathogen with the hand is more likely to result in the pathogen entering the body (e.g., through the mouth).

In Study 2 (n=453), we tested the prediction that people would be
more disgusted by a pathogen threat touching another person’s hand relative to another person’s foot; people touch others more with their hands than with their feet, so a person with a contaminated hand poses a greater disease threat than one with a pathogen on their foot.

In Study 3 (n=452), we tested the prediction that people would be more disgusted by skin wounds caused by pathogenic infections than by surgical incisions; although both wounds pose the risk of exposure
to another’s bodily fluids, wounds caused by pathogenic infections pose a greater disease threat.

Results across all three
experiments support the Threat-Dependent Disgust hypothesis, suggesting that disgust is sensitive to the magnitude of pathogen threat in a more finely tuned manner than previously demonstrated. (Link below.)

[Elias Acevedo @Lucidly_Elias]

I wrote a Substack on the interaction between our “better safe than sorry” biases and digital technology, and its impact on anxiety.

Link below.

[Elias Acevedo @Lucidly_Elias]

Great convo between @ChrisWillx and @LaithAlShawaf on the evolutionary logic of emotions—an incredibly fascinating and meaningful topic.

There’s a brief glimpse of our forthcoming theoretical paper on the emotion of awe in here too.

More on that soon!
https://t.co/norLe02xRA

[Elias Acevedo @Lucidly_Elias]

If a culture doesn’t have a word that refers to hands—perhaps they linguistically parse things up such that they only speak of fingers and limbs—we wouldn’t be tempted to conclude that they don’t possess the physical structures that correspond to our concept of hands.

Yes, hands are a concept, but the idea that “hands” are *strictly* constructs is a deepity.

In some trivial sense, it’s true, because hands is just a word—a category we use to refer to a specific set of structures, and it’s arbitrary how we delineate that category.

But in another sense, it’s false, because the existence of the physical structures that comprise this category do not causally depend on that category.

Fear is the same.

[Elias Acevedo @Lucidly_Elias]

“Beauty is in the adaptations of the beholder”—Symons, 1995.

From an evolutionary perspective, beauty isn’t arbitrary—it is directly tied to survival and reproduction.

Our ancestors developed preferences for hunan traits and features of natural environments that enhanced fitness, such as by signaling health, fertility, and resources.

Over millennia, these preferences have shaped what we perceive as beautiful today.

[Elias Acevedo @Lucidly_Elias]

This video is an intellectually dishonest hit-piece. It’s uncharitable to the point of being defamatory. It’s full of ad-hominem, logical/conceptual problems, and factual errors.

To endorse it is to do precisely what the video wrongly accuses EPists of doing - promote those who grossly distort the science.

[Kaitlyn White @kaypeathebee]

@sentientist https://t.co/DfKCZfIT6l

[Elias Acevedo @Lucidly_Elias]

@kaypeathebee and I collaborated on a rebuttal to münecat’s video “debunking” evolutionary psychology.

Hopefully this helps set the record straight!

https://t.co/uiox2gZIPa

[Kaitlyn White @kaypeathebee]

@munecatmusic https://t.co/DfKCZfIT6l

[Elias Acevedo @Lucidly_Elias]

@kaypeathebee and I collaborated on a rebuttal to münecat’s video “debunking” evolutionary psychology.

Hopefully this helps set the record straight!

https://t.co/uiox2gZIPa