Collateral Adapt Quotes

Zakrzewska’s work, ‘Olfaction and Prejudice’, explores how sickness-avoidance behaviours impact society in unexpected ways. She found evidence to show that ‘how easily one gets disgusted by body odours is reliably related to negative attitudes towards others’.23 Zakrzewska found that people who were most predisposed to body-odour disgust were more likely to exhibit explicit prejudice towards a fictitious refugee group, as well as harbour more implicit biases against real-life out-groups.24 These patterns were reliably reproduced in a number of different countries and cultures across the globe. In her thesis, Zakrzewska concedes that prejudice is, of course, not simply a function of our sense of smell, but these findings are an example of how many of our social biases ‘can at least partially be traced back to these primitive disease avoidance functions’. Disgust and avoidance are, respectively, emotions and behaviours adapted to aid our avoidance of pathogens, but they have surprising social consequences. We assume that the social reality we have constructed in the world – philosophy, politics, power – is built by human intellect, reason and will. But we are beginning to find out that it is profoundly influenced by feelings bubbling up from our body’s battle with the microbial world. It is intriguing to think that many of the behaviours that have shaped human history may have actually been the collateral damage of an ancient, ongoing microbial war.