Later, after she had already graduated, news reports came out exposing the teacher as a member of a neo-Nazi group. For Asma, the revelation led to some uncomfortable questions: What was it about me that this hateful man was okay with? And am I okay with being the sort of black person that hateful white people like?

The reason why we often feel unsettled by different beliefs and identities might be rooted in our most basic instincts. Specifically, it appears to be connected to our lizard-brain sense of disgust and cleanliness.

Since the Nobel Prize began in 1901, Denmark has produced more than thirty Nobel laureates per one million citizens. Italy, meanwhile, has generated just one prize-winner per million. South Korea acquires eight hundred international patents per million people per year, but Singapore gets only about eight.

In 2014, the Tulane psychologist Damian Murray set out to determine why this was. What separates countries that churn out lots of luminaries from those that don’t?

Predictable factors like wealth, education, and life expectancy made a big difference in a country’s level of innovation. But even when Murray took wealth and education into account, he uncovered a surprising circumstance that also affected creativity: how plagued by various infectious diseases—such as leprosy, malaria, and typhus—a given country had been in the early twentieth century. The reason a heavy disease burden dampened the kind of creative thinking required to win a Nobel, Murray found,157 was because worrying about biological threats made people in those nations more conformist.

A history of infectious diseases didn’t make people in those nations dim-witted. But, according to this theory, it helped make them more traditional and avoidant of other people, and thus, less likely to come up with new and interesting ideas. Often, what leads to innovation are, precisely, norm-violating, nonconformist ideas. (In lab settings, for example, people who are more outraged by norm violations tend to register as less creative. People who notice and react very strongly to social norm violations tend not to think outside of the box, Michele Gelfand told me.)

Murray found that the more pathogens burdened a given society, the more its citizens became increasingly authoritarian, less individualistic, and less creative. They came to distrust anything, or anyone, that seemed weird. As a result, they were safer, perhaps, but also less inventive than their historically healthier neighbors.