• Alex Savin
• March 28, 2022
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Why we Avoid People With Facial Disfigurement

It is automatic for most people to cringe at the sight of a person with a facial disfigurement. Facial disfigurements such as cleft lips, unsightly birthmarks, psoriasis, and others evoke disgust. We tend to distance ourselves from them or even avoid them completely, even when we know their conditions are not contagious. A recently conducted study absolves us of the blame, placing it squarely on an inborn disease avoidance system that works to prevent us from contracting diseases and infections from the environment.

Reaction to Facial Disfigurement. Evolutionary Reasons

Psychologists and researchers who have been investigating the source of this disgust have likened this disgust to fear. Valerie Curtis says that fear evolved to keep us away from predators and other animals that posed an external threat. Curtis is a behavioral scientist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. She likens fear to disgust, saying that disgust evolved to keep us away from animals and organisms that pose an internal threat, for example, disease-causing microorganisms. In her book, Curtis explains that our minds are constantly and subconsciously scanning the environment for threats that, when perceived, prompt reactions of disgust.

Going by this theory, our responses to people with contagious diseases such as influenza would have to be consistent with the reactions to people with facial disfigurements. However, that is not usually the case, implying something fundamentally wrong with the theory or disease avoidance system. Some previously conducted studies attempted to explain this difference in perceiving other disfigurements. The findings were, however, inconclusive.

What the Experiments Show

Psychologists at Sydney’s Macquarie University conducted various experiments to test this theory. Ninety-eight volunteers screened three videos of a person interacting with an inanimate object. The actor in the first video looked perfectly healthy, while the one in the second video had a port-wine stain birthmark on his face. The third video featured an actor who had flu-like symptoms. In each video, the actors had a prop that they put into their mouths. The researchers then gave the support, which included a snorkel, a harmonica, and a towel, to the volunteers and asked them to mimic as much as they could what they had seen in the videos. The objective of the experiment was to have them believe that the props had been used by the actors they had seen then see how far they were willing to go. The scientists found out that volunteers reacted similarly to those props used by the sick and disfigured models. They wiped them and made disgusted faces frequently while they were at it. The reinforcements never came within an inch of their mouths, and they were treated with the same disgust regardless of who used them. Despite the volunteers acknowledging in a questionnaire filled out before the experiment, they knew influenza was more disgusting and lethal than a birthmark.

Perception of Facial Disfigurement in Culture

In a study report yet to be published in the Evolution and Human behavior magazine, scientists wrote that the facial birthmark acted as a disease cue that prompted the responses. Curtis acknowledges the study’s findings, saying it affirms that disgust is primarily related to disease avoidance. Justin Park, a psychologist at the University of Bristol in the UK, said the study showed how oblivious we are to the underlying causes of our actions. Another psychologist from the University of British Columbia in Canada, Mark Schaller, weighs in on the study saying that the prejudicial reactions exhibited by the volunteers could be inborn.

The question that arises from all this is: “Can anything be done about this behavior?” Justin Park believes that educational conditioning is the answer. He argues that people are not born with a database of disease signs. They are learned with time through exposure. If people could get accustomed to disfigured people, the problem would be half solved. This, he suggests, can be achieved by showing images of impaired people on TV more often. Schaller notes that these prejudicial reactions were more intense in people who felt vulnerable to disease. To this end, he proposes adopting health policies that would make people think disease resistant. For instance, people immunized against seasonal flu showed less prejudicial reactions.