Sensitizing the behavioral-immune system: The power of social pain

People who believe they are invulnerable to infectious diseases often fail to protect themselves against the disease threats that others pose to them. The current paper tests the hypothesis that social pain - the experience of feeling interpersonally hurt or rejected - motivates people who would otherwise discount the disease threat posed by COVID-19 to protect themselves against it. We conducted 4 daily diary studies involving 2794 participants who reported how hurt/rejected they felt by those they knew, how personally concerned they were about the spread of illness/COVID-19, and how vigilantly they engaged in 6 different self-protective behaviors each day. Meta-analyzing the lagged analyses from all 4 studies revealed robust, replicable evidence that people who believed they were invulnerable to infectious disease engaged in more concerted efforts to protect themselves against COVID-19 when they were in acute social pain.