Virus fears can easily spill into xenophobia
As a virus shrinks our globalised worlds and forces us to physically pull away from each other, the idea that ‘‘foreign’’ equals ‘‘threatening’’ to our evolutionary brains is worth a closer look. Distrusting things or people that are unfamiliar to us is, research says, built into the wiring of our neurological systems because of the risk that they might harbour pathogens. This first line of defence against disease can cause, for example, repulsion at the sight of infected wounds, avoidance of looking at asymmetrical faces or dismembered bodies, and suspicion of foul smells. In these instances, our prehistoric brains signal that there could be a risk of a contaminant.
Psychologists call this the behavioural immune system, a series of responses to things unknown and potentially harmful to us. It’s been helpful in keeping us alive as a species but can be unnecessarily sensitive and unresponsive to modern-day factors that render it useless or objectionable.
Our instinct to avoid diseases has been found to contribute to prejudice against people with disabilities, the elderly, and the obese – though disabilities, age, and fat are not contagious. It has also been shown to strengthen feelings of xenophobia, the close cousin of racism.
Of course, these prejudices become exaggerated when people feel especially vulnerable to infectious diseases. In one study, pregnant women in their first trimester, when their immune systems are suppressed and they are more likely to fall ill, exhibited more xenophobic attitudes than the same women later in their pregnancies. Across many studies and cultures, this trend finds evidence – the more vulnerable we feel to disease, the more likely we are to put up barriers towards people understood to be foreign.
It’s happening now. Two Filipino girls were barred from an Auckland school, against Ministry of Education guidelines, well before any schools were affected by the virus. A Malay-Chinese New Zealander told The Project people stared at her, leaned away, and avoided her on the streets because she was wearing a mask. At a South Island school, an email was sent to an Asian woman demanding she ‘‘let your kids stay at home as you Asians are virus spreaders! Our Kiwi kids don’t want to be in the same class as your disgusting virus spreaders.’’
These and many other incidences of racist and ethnocentric behaviour led the World Health Organisation’s director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, to state: ‘‘Stigma, to be honest, is more dangerous than the virus itself.’’
While our behavioural immune systems may be instinctive, they can, like our biological ones, easily get out of control. Instead of using scientific evidence that identifies who is most at risk of making us sick, our fear of diseases is driven by innate feelings that can be full of errors. Olga Khazan, in The Atlantic, writes, ‘‘the behavioural immune system, like an allergy, is so sensitive that it’s often wrong. It sometimes hurts us more than it helps.’’
Thankfully, modern-day humans have lots of experience with de-sensitising old instincts for the greater good. For instance, our primal brains get anxious when we’re singled out from the crowd since, in an evolutionary sense, this could mean expulsion from the tribe and being left to survive in the savannah on our own without our clan to protect us. This instinct makes modern-day public speaking nerve-racking to most of us. But we can learn to suppress this fear, to control it, even to use it to our advantage.
We rise above our fight or flight instinct all the time. When faced with danger, we can recognise when our bodies are preparing to run or battle, as our ancient ancestors needed to do in order to survive. Modern psychology has taught us to identify this stress response and moderate it in natural, appropriate ways, like breathing deeply or doing exercise.
Covid-19 has begun its exponential journey across New Zealand. As contagions grow and the world as we know it changes for good or for now, our oversensitive behavioural immune responses must be kept, like other instincts, in check.
Reflecting the same concerns as Ghebreyesus, a sociology lecturer at the Education University of Hong Kong, Minnie Li, argues: ‘‘The lived experiences of those who are scorned, feared, driven away, and unfairly labelled as ‘infected’ may show us how the climate of fear we have created could in fact cause far more serious damage to society than the epidemic itself.’’
We must remind ourselves Covid-19 does not discriminate on the basis of skin colour, birth country, age, or appearance. During and after this pandemic – in spite of our instincts – nor should we.
Instead of using scientific evidence ... our fear of diseases is driven by innate feelings that can be full of errors.