Managing Contagion with Framing: Inattention and Ritual Rules

Negative contagion beliefs can make ordinary contact feel contaminating.

Contagion beliefs develop during childhood. Because the history of an entity is critical, contagion often holds that appearance is not equal to reality—the opposite of similarity—and it frequently invokes invisible entities and abstract conceptions that young children cannot easily grasp. Most work on contagion in children has focused on negative contagion in the food domain, such as insect contaminants touching edible items. Early studies suggested that American children begin to apply contagion principles in the food domain around ages 6 to 8; however, more sensitive measures with Australian preschoolers indicate that sensitivity to negative contagion may emerge as early as 4 years old. Young children tend to blur the distinction between association and true contagion, and in both American and Hindu Indian cultures, the earliest mental models of contagion appear to be based on material essences. Understanding this gradual developmental trajectory helps explain why individuals and cultures later differ in what they find contaminating and in the strategies they use to manage those feelings.

One is continuously faced with abundant situations that present the possibility of negative contagion: the air breathed out by others around us; the necessarily shared objects, such as doorknobs, plates, and silverware in restaurants; money; and seats in public places. We propose that negative contagion is generally managed under the general aegis of framing, with two particular strategies: inattention and ritual rules.

Inattention. Inattention is like the Freudian defense mechanism of denial, except that it may be much more passive. We simply do not think much about the interpersonal history of most objects we deal with. When we receive change in the store, we do not think of the long string of humans, no doubt some unsavory, who handled it previously; likewise for the interpersonal history of a public bathroom doorknob or a seat on a train. The domains of inattention vary across individuals and cultures. The authors contrast concerns about shoes carrying dirt into Japanese homes with American attitudes toward indoor shoes. They also contrast traditional shared bath water in Japan with American discomfort about that practice. These are cultural patterns described in the source, not uniform attitudes held by everyone in either country.

Ritual rules. Typically in religious systems, problems of contagion may be handled by establishing rituals to decontaminate and setting limits on the range of contamination. The source emphasizes examples from Judaism and Hinduism and connects them to traditions in which descent can shape membership (Morris, 1997). This does not mean that membership is determined only by biology or that conversion is absent. A particularly clear example of a ritual boundary is the 1/60th rule of Kashrut, relating to contamination of kosher foods by non-kosher entities (Nemeroff & Rozin, 1992). In the accidental-mixture cases described here, the rule treats food as remaining kosher when the contaminant is less than 1/60th of the total volume. We have shown, however, that for a majority of Jews, the ritual boundary does not align with feelings; that is, although such people understand that a food accidentally contaminated at a level of less than 1/60th remains kosher, they find it offensive and reject it. There was a weak indication in the results from this study that the more kosher/orthodox Jews were more likely to be willing to consume technically kosher contaminations (less than 1/60th contaminant). This suggests that deep commitment to the Jewish dietary laws may successfully aid in the alignment of ritual boundaries and feelings, and set limits on emotional/magical contagion reactions.