The global pandemic brought unprecedented challenges and changes to societies worldwide. Beyond the immediate health crisis, there was a significant impact on our social lives. One area of concern was whether the heightened risk of infectious diseases would lead to increased xenophobia—fear or hatred of foreigners and immigrants. A popular hypothesis from the behavioral immune system literature said yes. It suggests that negative attitudes toward outgroups serve pathogen-neutralizing functions. The reasoning is straightforward: outgroup individuals, on average, are more likely to carry novel pathogens against which the local group has limited immunity, making intergroup interactions pose higher infectious disease threats. Such pathogen aversion produces xenophobic sentiments and discrimination, specifically towards certain types of outgroups, for protecting health benefit. Given historical instances where disease outbreaks have been associated with a rise in xenophobic sentiments, this seems a plausible hypothesis. However, a recent longitudinal investigation provides some surprising insights.

We conducted a two-year longitudinal study to see whether the development of COVID-19 did lead to more anti-immigrant sentiment. Data were collected in the Netherlands with a representative sample at four points from May 2020 to June 2022, capturing changes over time as the pandemic progressed, and exploring whether and how individual differences in explicit disease concerns and disgust sensitivity influenced these attitudes. Contrary to the original pathogen-outgroup hypothesis, we did not observe a significant increase in anti-immigrant attitudes even during the height of the pandemic. While the overall levels of xenophobia didn’t change, individuals with higher levels of trait disgust sensitivity were more likely to hold such sentiments. Interestingly, explicit disease concerns and within-person changes in disgust sensitivity did not lead to changes in anti-immigrant attitudes. We also tested whether attributes of immigrant affected such results by manipulating their origin nations and personal backgrounds. Indeed, participants perceived more culturally distant nations as more culturally dissimilar. However, we did not detect interactions between cultural distance and time of assessment during the pandemic, explicit disease concerns, or disgust sensitivity. Similarly, pathogen-relevant variables largely did not moderate attitudes toward immigrants who were more versus less willing to provide resources, more versus less able to provide resources, and more versus less assimilated the hosting culture.

These results indicate that the immediate aversion to infection might not be a significant driver of anti-immigrant issues. While historical instances might suggest a link, this study shows that modern societies, at least in the context of the Netherlands, might respond differently. A public health crisis doesn’t inevitably lead to a breakdown in social cohesion. Although other results from previous studies seem to provide evidence supporting the idea that the behavioral immune system relates to intergroup attitudes in some way, the main take-home message from our paper is that the story behind these mechanisms is probably more complex than group membership being treated as solely indicative of pathogen threat. As we continue to navigate a world that may face future pandemics, understanding these dynamics will be crucial. It reminds us that human behavior is influenced by a myriad of factors and that societal resilience often lies in the details of our psychological makeup and social structures.

To learn more, check out Lei Fan et al.’s paper Salience of infectious diseases did not increase xenophobia during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Lei Fan is a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for the Experimental-Philosophical Study of Discrimination (CEPDISC), Department of Political Science, Aarhus University. His work is dedicated to better understanding how people navigate threats and opportunities posed by social living, with an interdisciplinary combination of ideas and techniques from social psychology, personality psychology, behavioral genetics, evolutionary biology, and political science to better understand the human mind.