Birine verdiğimiz değer, göze aldığımız enfeksiyon riskini şekillendiriyor

Building relationships requires social contact, yet getting close to others also gives infectious diseases a chance to spread. An international PNAS study, including researchers from Karolinska Institutet, explored how people balance these competing concerns. The team surveyed 42,756 participants in 61 communities worldwide. Participants imagined their best friend, a casual acquaintance, a stranger or somebody they strongly disliked, then rated their comfort with sharing that person’s water bottle or sitting with their legs touching, and said whether they would greet them with a touch. In every society, the more a relationship was valued, the more readily people accepted such potentially risky contact, a link that varied little across countries and cultures. Societal factors, including individualism, social norms and past disease levels, mattered far less. Differences between societies appeared mainly in valued relationships: where infections had historically been more common, people were slightly more cautious about such contact, even with close friends. With strangers, by contrast, societies differed very little.