Crowd Salience Heightens Tolerance to Healthy Facial Features

Objective Recent findings suggest crowd salience heightens pathogen-avoidant motives, serving to reduce individuals’ infection risk through interpersonal contact. Such experiences may similarly facilitate the identification, and avoidance, of diseased conspecifics. The current experiment sought to replicate and extend previous crowding research. Methods In this experiment, we primed participants at two universities with either a crowding or control experience before having them evaluate faces manipulated to appear healthy or diseased by indicating the degree to which they would want to interact with them. Results Crowding-primed participants reported a more heightened preferences for healthy faces than control-primed participants. Additionally, crowd salience reduced aversion toward healthy faces but did not heighten aversion to diseased faces. Conclusion Results suggest crowding appears to heighten tolerance for health cues given the heightened proximal threat of infections through interpersonal contact within crowded environments. Conversely, this work extends previous findings by indicating this preference is not rooted in an aversion to cues of poor health. We frame findings from a threat management perspective in understanding how crowding fosters sensitivity toward pathogenic threats.