{
  "abstract": "Interpersonal contact is essential for cooperation and care, but it also provides a route for pathogen transmission between individuals. Hence, a key challenge for social organisms involves maintaining beneficial social contact while also limiting exposure to infection risks. Existing proposals suggest that this trade-off is guided by the interpersonal value of specific social targets. In addition, ecological and cultural factors, including historical pathogen prevalence, individualism-collectivism, tightness-looseness, and relational mobility, might also shape how people avoid pathogens. To test whether and how infection-risky social contact varies with individual-level interpersonal value and these societal-level factors, we collected data from 47,756 participants across 61 societies. Participants were randomly assigned to picture a social target - either a friend, acquaintance, stranger, or enemy. They then rated their comfort with infection-risky contact with that target (e.g., drinking from the same water bottle) and whether they would touch the target when greeting them. In all societies, participants were more comfortable with infection-risky contact and more likely to engage in physical contact during greetings with targets of higher interpersonal value. Such associations varied only modestly across societies. Notably, the associations between infection-risky contact and societal-level factors depended on target interpersonal value and were concentrated among high-value targets-contact was lower where historical pathogen prevalence and tightness were greater and higher where individualism and relational mobility were greater. These findings suggest that infection-risky contact is primarily guided by the value of social targets, with ecological and cultural factors playing a lesser role.",
  "abstract_shown": true,
  "affiliations": [
    "Department of Experimental and Applied Psychology, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam 1081 BT, The Netherlands.",
    "Institute for Brain and Behavior, Amsterdam 1081 BT, The Netherlands.",
    "Tilburg School of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Department of Social Psychology, Tilburg University, Tilburg 5037 AB, The Netherlands.",
    "Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109.",
    "Department of Psychology, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, CO 80918.",
    "Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse, Toulouse School of Economics, University of Toulouse Capitole, Toulouse 31080 Cedex 6, France.",
    "Institute for Evolutionary Sciences, Université de Montpellier, CNRS, Institut de Recherche pour le Développement, École Pratique des Hautes Études, Montpellier 34095 Cedex 5, France.",
    "School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford, Oxford OX2 6PE, United Kingdom.",
    "Psychology Department, University of Ghana, Legon LG 25, Ghana.",
    "Department of International Business, Norges Teknisk-Naturvitenskapelige Universitet, Ålesund 7491, Norway.",
    "Psychology, Department of Humanities, Åbo Akademi University, Turku 20500, Finland.",
    "Department of Anthropology, İstanbul University, Istanbul 34452, Türkiye.",
    "State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Science and Mental Health, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China.",
    "Department of Psychology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China.",
    "Laboratorio de Evolucion y Relaciones Interpersonales, Universidad de Santiago de Chile, Santiago 9170022, Chile.",
    "Escuela de Medicina y Ciencias de La Salud, Universidad del Rosario, Bogotá 111711, Colombia.",
    "Department of Psychology, University of Guelph, Guelph, ON N1G 2W1, Canada.",
    "Department of Psychology, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287.",
    "Social and Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, Mackenzie Presbyterian University, São Paulo 01302-907, Brazil.",
    "National Institute of Science and Technology on Social and Affective Neuroscience, Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico, São Paulo 01302-907, Brazil.",
    "Department of Occupational, Economic and Social Psychology, Faculty of Psychology, University of Vienna, Vienna 1010, Austria.",
    "Department of Banking and Finance, University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck 6020, Austria.",
    "The Faculty of Psychology, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok 10330, Thailand.",
    "Department of Philosophy, Sociology, Education and Applied Psychology, University of Padua, Padua 35131, Italy.",
    "Department of Anthropology, Hatay Mustafa Kemal University, Hatay 31060, Turkey.",
    "School of Psychological Sciences, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW 2109, Australia.",
    "Department of Psychology, James Cook University, Singapore 387380, Singapore.",
    "Center for Social and Cognitive Neuroscience, School of Psychology, Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, Viña del Mar 2520000, Chile.",
    "Center of Social Conflict and Cohesion Studies, Santiago 7500011, Chile.",
    "School of Psychology, University of Southampton, Southampton SO17 1BJ, United Kingdom.",
    "Institut Jean Nicod, Département d'études Cognitives, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Université Paris Sciences et Lettres, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, CNRS, Paris 75005, France.",
    "Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON M5S 1A1, Canada.",
    "School of Psychology, Murdoch University, Murdoch, WA 6150, Australia.",
    "Anthropology Department, Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Quito 170901, Ecuador.",
    "Department of Philosophy and History of Science, Faculty of Science, Charles University, Prague 128 00, Czech Republic.",
    "Department of Management, Aarhus University, Aarhus 8210, Denmark.",
    "Department of Psychology, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA 70118.",
    "Psychology Department, Universidade Federal de Sergipe, São Cristóvão 49100-000, Brazil.",
    "Department of Anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095.",
    "University of California, Los Angeles Center for Behavior, Evolution and Culture, Los Angeles, CA 90095."
  ],
  "article_type": "research article",
  "arxiv": null,
  "author_total": 150,
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      "name": "Hongyu Sun",
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      "name": "Coralie Chevallier"
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      "name": "Éloïse Côté"
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      "name": "Sam P Dale",
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      "name": "Florencio Delgado Espinoza",
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      "name": "Daniela Dlouhá"
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      "name": "Izzet Duyar",
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      "name": "Christian T Elbæk",
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      "name": "Ana María Fernández",
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      "name": "Diogo C S Ferreira",
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      "name": "Daniel M T Fessler",
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      "name": "Pablo Ezequiel Flores-Kanter",
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      "name": "Natalia Frankowska",
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      "name": "Ana Luísa Freitas",
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      "name": "Márta Fülöp",
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      "name": "Marcello Gallucci"
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    {
      "name": "Zachary H Garfield",
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    {
      "name": "Margarida V Garrido",
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    {
      "name": "Ekmel Gecer",
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      "name": "Macarena González-Portilla",
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      "name": "Dmitry Grigoryev",
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    {
      "name": "Minh-Tri Ha"
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    {
      "name": "Brahim Hamdaoui",
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    {
      "name": "Sahar Nadeem Hamid"
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      "name": "Jan Havlíček"
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      "name": "Ian Hohm",
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      "name": "Szilárd Holka",
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      "name": "Minsung Hong"
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  "bibtex": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/6eyqefknm2wvh.bib",
  "cited_by": 0,
  "doi": "10.1073/pnas.2615739123",
  "fulltext_url": "https://europepmc.org/articles/PMC13684243",
  "id": "6eyqefknm2wvh",
  "issns": [
    "0027-8424",
    "1091-6490"
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  "landing_url": "https://europepmc.org/article/MED/42879482",
  "language": "eng",
  "licence": "CC-BY",
  "licence_label": "CC BY",
  "licence_source": "article",
  "licence_url": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
  "metadata_licence": null,
  "native_subjects": [
    [
      "openalex",
      "3207|Cultural Differences and Values"
    ]
  ],
  "openalex": "W7222319822",
  "pdf_url": "https://europepmc.org/articles/PMC13684243?pdf=render",
  "pmcid": "PMC13684243",
  "pmid": "42879482",
  "published": "2026-10-15",
  "publisher": null,
  "ris": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/6eyqefknm2wvh.ris",
  "sources": [
    {
      "first_seen": "2026-10-30T12:18:46Z",
      "native_id": "MED:42879482",
      "source": "europepmc",
      "url": "https://europepmc.org/article/MED/42879482"
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  ],
  "subjects": [
    {
      "field": "biochemistry",
      "origin": "journal-openalex:1312|Genomics and Chromatin Dynamics",
      "subfield": "molecular-biology"
    }
  ],
  "title": "Interpersonal value regulates infection-risky social contact across 61 societies.",
  "title_text": "Interpersonal value regulates infection-risky social contact across 61 societies.",
  "type": "peer-reviewed",
  "updated_at": "2026-10-30T12:18:46Z",
  "url": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/6eyqefknm2wvh",
  "venue": "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America",
  "versions": []
}