Ostensibly serving to restrict contact with disease vectors, humans exhibit aversion toward cues heuristically inferred as pathogenic. This restriction could lead perceivers to downregulate their interest in food consumption, even if such cues may not connote actual disease threats. This proclivity to avoid disease led us to consider how heuristic disease cues inform interest in foods. Participants evaluated a hypothetical food preparer that varied in the presence of heuristic cues to disease transmission (i.e., physical deformities versus healthy control). Individuals with low levels of perceived infectability were more discerning of the social target as a function of disease cues, whereas heightened levels of this trait fostered an overall aversion to targets regardless of health status. Results provide continued evidence for how pathogen avoidance motives compete with other somatic motives.
Internet access has become a fundamental component of contemporary society, with major impacts in many areas that offer opportunities for new research insights. The search and deposition of information in digital media form large sets of data known as digital corpora, which can be used to generate structured data, representing repositories of knowledge and evidence of human culture. This information offers opportunities for scientific investigations that contribute to the understanding of human behavior on a large scale, reaching human populations/individuals that would normally be difficult to access. These tools can help access social and cultural varieties worldwide. In this article, we briefly review the potential of these corpora in the study of human behavior. Therefore, we propose Culturomics of Human Behavior as an approach to understand, explain, and predict human behavior using digital corpora.