How can we improve identification of contagious individuals? Factors influencing sickness detection.

Abstract

The comment by Kurvers and Wolf [1] on our recent publication [2] highlights some urgent questions that emerge not only in the wake of our study, but also in relation to the developing field of how behavioural mechanisms have evolved to defend against microbial infections. Their additional analyses of our data show that, even though there were small individual differences in the ability to discriminate between healthy and sick individuals (although some expert raters were identified), there were substantial differences in response bias, that is, how individuals balance the trade-off between sensitivity and specificity. Kurvers and Wolf also focus on how social-learning strategies could influence the detection of disease cues, and thereby disease dynamics, in the population in relation to the social network position of the ‘detector’. Thus, how do individuals differ in their ability to discriminate between sick and healthy peers, and in what way can social information—learning from others—influence one's responses to potentially sick people? There are good reasons …