When Olivia Attwood told the cameras she had “caught the ick” during the third series of Love Island in June 2017, she gave a name to something millions of people had felt but never articulated. Her relationship with Sam Gowland hadn’t ended in betrayal or cruelty – it ended because she watched him walk across the villa and something clicked off in her brain. “When you’ve seen a boy, and got the ick, it doesn’t go,” she said in the confessional. “It’s caught you, and it’s taken over your body. It’s just ick. I can’t shake it off.” The term spread through Twitter, then Tumblr, then TikTok, where the hashtag #theick has accumulated over 157 million views. It entered the Oxford English Dictionary. Keir Starmer used it at Prime Minister’s Questions to describe Boris Johnson. The word stuck because the feeling is universal: the sudden, visceral repulsion toward someone you were, only moments ago, attracted to.
What the meme obscured is the science underneath it. In February 2025, a team of psychologists at Azusa Pacific University in California published the first empirical study of the ick in Personality and Individual Differences, one of the field’s peer-reviewed journals. The research – authored by Professor Brian Collisson, graduate researcher Eliana Saunders, and psychologist Chloe Yin – found that the ick is neither trivial nor irrational. It is, they argue, an evolutionary mechanism that has been turbocharged by dating apps and social media. Their findings complicate the cultural narrative around the ick in ways that deserve scrutiny.
What the Study Actually Found
The researchers began with a pilot analysis: they collected 86 TikTok videos tagged #theick and categorised the triggers people described. The list was long and oddly specific. Women reported being repulsed by partners who laid their heads on their shoulders, wore denim jorts, shushed other women in public, or displayed overt misogyny. Men were more likely to cite speech patterns, physical quirks, and behaviours perceived as trying too hard to fit trends. Several icks bordered on the absurd – legs dangling from a barstool, eating spaghetti with visible sauce at the corners of the mouth, running for a bus.
The main study surveyed 125 single adults between the ages of 24 and 72, recruited via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Each participant reported their familiarity with the term “the ick,” whether they had experienced it, how often, and what happened afterwards. They also completed validated personality measures assessing three traits: disgust sensitivity, grandiose narcissism, and other-oriented perfectionism.
The numbers were striking. Sixty-four per cent of participants said they had experienced the ick. On average, they reported feeling it approximately six times in their dating history – though one outlier reported 300 instances. The consequences were severe: 26 per cent ended the relationship immediately, while 42 per cent ended it later. Only 32 per cent stayed. And the experience was overwhelmingly private: just 28 per cent shared it with the partner who caused it, though 92 per cent told someone else, most commonly friends.
The Three Engines Behind the Feeling
The personality data revealed three distinct drivers. People with higher disgust sensitivity – a trait more commonly associated with avoiding pathogens and contaminated food – were significantly more likely to experience the ick. This link suggests the ick may be a byproduct of an ancient system designed to protect organisms from disease vectors, repurposed for mate evaluation.
Narcissism operated differently. People scoring high on grandiose narcissism measures were more likely to report the ick, but not more frequently. They were selective – a partner’s perceived flaw triggered the response only when it threatened their self-image or status projection. As Collisson explained in an interview with TherapyTips: “The correlation with perfectionism and narcissism is evident, as individuals with these traits tend to seek partners who elevate their status and have fewer imperfections.”
Perfectionism proved the most pervasive trigger. Other-oriented perfectionism – rigid, exacting expectations imposed on other people – predicted both the likelihood and frequency of the ick. If you demand flawlessness from others, you will be repulsed more often, by more things. The finding carries uncomfortable implications for the curated perfection of dating-app profiles, where users are reduced to their most polished image and judged on single photographs.
Gender, Biology, and the Swipe-Left Economy
Women were more likely to have experienced the ick (75 per cent versus 57 per cent of men) and more likely to know the term (63 per cent versus 39 per cent). The researchers frame this through parental investment theory: because women bear greater biological costs in reproduction, they may have evolved more stringent filtering mechanisms. The ick, in this reading, is not pettiness – it is a rapid, subconscious assessment of a potential partner’s suitability as a co-parent.
But biology is not the whole explanation. Chloe Yin told Deutsche Welle that “social media is like a loudspeaker that amplifies to create normalization. It may be an internalised mate selection behaviour that becomes validated through social reinforcement.” The distinction matters. An evolutionary predisposition becomes a cultural habit when platforms reward it with content, community, and comedy. The TikTok ick format – face the camera, name your ick, cut to a reenactment – is inherently performative. It transforms private ambivalence into public entertainment.
Matt Hussey, a London-based integrative therapist, offered a complementary diagnosis to Vogue: “We’re dating in a swipe-left economy, where people are reduced to profiles and soundbites. That flattens nuance and makes it easier to ditch someone over a single cringe moment rather than having to sit with ambivalence. The ick might not always mean this isn’t the right person – sometimes it means: this person is making me feel something I don’t know how to handle.” The swipe-left economy doesn’t create the ick, but it lowers the threshold for acting on it.
The Ancient Roots of a Modern Problem
The study places the ick within a broader evolutionary framework: error management theory, developed by Martie Haselton and David Buss, which proposes that cognitive biases evolved to minimise the cost of mating mistakes. It is less dangerous, from a reproductive standpoint, to reject a good partner than to accept a bad one. The ick may function as an early-warning system – a fast, instinctive gut check that bypasses deliberation.
But the theory has limits. As Collisson noted, the ick “aligns with error management theory – in which an individual is wired to avoid mating mistakes. On the other hand, it can also be a cognitive bias, since it is less about genuine incompatibility.” The same mechanism that once protected ancestors from unreliable mates now fires at a man for wearing outdated trainers. Ancestral anxiety about social ostracisation gets mapped onto a partner’s nasal laugh. The system misfires because the environment has changed faster than the biology.
Raquel Peel, a psychology researcher at the University of Notre Dame in Australia, told Deutsche Welle that this misalignment reflects a broader cultural problem: “The modern dating scene is overwhelmed by individuals with high and possibly unrealistic expectations of their intimate partners. Although there is a great choice out there, there seems to be little accountability to self-improve or work on their own relationships.”
When the Ick Becomes Diagnostic
The study’s most actionable finding is that the ick, properly interrogated, can function as a diagnostic tool rather than a death sentence for relationships. A separate 2023 study in the same journal found that couples who reframed disgust as curiosity – asking “why does this bother me?” rather than acting on the impulse – reported higher relationship satisfaction.
The researchers distinguish between two kinds of ick. The first is a legitimate intuition-driven warning: a signal that a partner’s behaviour genuinely conflicts with one’s values or needs. The second is a perfectionism-driven reflex: a cognitive bias triggered not by incompatibility but by deviation from an idealised image. The challenge is telling them apart. A partner’s messy eating might signal genuine disorganisation – or it might be a harmless quirk that disgust sensitivity has inflated into a dealbreaker.
The researchers are now investigating whether ick responses predict long-term relationship outcomes. Early indications suggest the answer is contextual: for people high in disgust sensitivity or perfectionism, the ick may systematically filter out viable partners, leading to a pattern of serial rejection. For others, it may function as a useful, if blunt, early warning.
From Reality TV to Real Consequences
What began as a throwaway line on Love Island has become a genuine object of empirical study – and a lens into how modern humans navigate attraction, rejection, and the gap between instinct and reason. The ick is not new. Ally McBeal used the term in 1998; Sex and the City explored it in a 2004 episode called “The Ick Factor.” What is new is the infrastructure that amplifies it. Dating apps compress partner evaluation into seconds. Social media rewards the public performance of romantic disgust. Reality television aestheticises the feeling and makes it aspirational.
The Azusa Pacific study does not moralise. It does not argue that the ick is good or bad, rational or irrational. It argues that the ick is a measurable phenomenon with identifiable psychological correlates, and that understanding those correlates – disgust sensitivity, narcissism, perfectionism – may help people make more deliberate choices about when to trust the feeling and when to interrogate it. In a culture that increasingly treats romantic instinct as infallible, that distinction is worth preserving.
Collisson’s summary is characteristically measured: “The ick can be triggered by minor unrealistic expectations, so it could be self-sabotage. However, it can also be an intuition-driven warning to help with mate selection.” The difference between the two is not always obvious. But learning to ask the question – is this my gut talking, or my ego? – may be the most useful thing a generation raised on the ick can do.
