The strange politics of disgust David Pizarro

in the 17th century a woman named

Juliana to fauna had a very successful

perfume business for over 50 years she

ran it it sort of ended abruptly when

she was executed for murdering 600 men

she it wasn’t a very good perfume in

fact it was completely odorless and

tasteless and colorless but as a poison

it was the best money could buy so women

flocked to her in order to murder their

husbands it turns out that poisoners

were valued and feared group because

poisoning a human being is quite

difficult thing the reason is we have

sort of a built-in poison detector you

can see this as early as even a newborn

infants if you are willing to do this

you can take a couple of drops of a

bitter substance or sour substance and

you’ll see that face the tongue stick

out the wrinkled nose as if they’re

trying to get rid of what’s in their

mouth this reaction expands into

adulthood and become sort of a

full-blown disgust response no longer

just about whether or not we’re about to

be poisoned but whenever there’s a

threat of physical contamination from

some source but the face remains

strikingly similar it has expanded more

though than just keeping us away from

physical contaminants and there’s a

growing body of evidence to suggest that

in fact this emotion of disgust now

influences our moral beliefs and even

our deeply held political intuitions why

this might be the case we can understand

this process by understanding a little

bit about emotions in general so the

basic human emotions those those kinds

of emotions that we share with all other

human beings exist because they motivate

us to do good things and they keep us

away from doing bad things so by and

large they are good for our survival

take the emotion of fear for instance it

keeps us away from doing things that are

really really risky this photo taken

just before his death is actually a no

one reason this photo is interesting is

because most people wouldn’t would not

do this and if they did they were

not live to tell it because fear would

have kicked in a long time ago to a

natural predator just like fear offers

this protective benefit disqus seems to

do the same thing except for what

discuss does keeps us away from not

things that might eat us or heights but

rather things that might poison us or

give us disease and make us sick so one

of the features of disgust that makes it

such an interesting emotion is that it’s

very very easy to elicit in fact more so

than probably any of the other basic

emotions and so i’m going to show you

that with a couple of images i could

probably make you feel disgust to turn

away i’ll tell you when you can turn

back i can you see it every day right

okay come on okay turn back so that’s if

you didn’t look those those probably

made a lot of you in the audience feel

very very disgusted but if you didn’t

look and i can tell you about some of

the other things that have been shown

sort of across the world to make people

disgust at things like feces urine blood

rotten flesh these are the sorts of

things that it makes sense for us to

stay away from because they might

actually contaminate us in fact just

having a diseased appearance or odd

sexual acts these things are also things

that give us a lot of disgust Darwin was

probably one of the first scientists to

systematically investigate the human

emotions and he pointed to the universal

nature and the strength of the disgust

response this is an anecdote from his

travels in South America in Tierra del

Fuego a native touch with his finger

some cold preserved meat while I was

eating and plainly showed disgust at its

softness while I felt that are discussed

at my food being touched by a naked

savage though his hands did not appear

dirty he later wrote it’s it’s okay some

of my best friends or naked savages

it will turns out it’s not only old

timey british scientists were the

squeamish i recently got a chance to

talk to richard dawkins for a

documentary and I and I was able to

discuss him a bunch of times here’s my

favorite he evolved around clip shipment

sex or attached to deep-rooted emotions

and reactions that are hard to jettison

overnight so my favorite part of this

clip is that that Professor Dawkins

actually gagged hijos back in he gags

and we had to do it three times and all

three times he gagged and he was really

gay I thought he might throw up on me

actually one of the features though of

disgust is not just its universality and

its strength but the way that it works

through association so when one

disgusting thing touches a clean thing

that clean thing becomes disgusting not

the other way around this makes it very

useful as a strategy if you want to

convince somebody that an object or an

individual or an entire social group is

disgusting and should be avoided the

philosopher Martha Nussbaum points this

out in this quote thus throughout

history certain discussed property sly

meanness bad smell stickiness decay

paleness have repeatedly a monotonous

Lee been associated with Jews women

homosexuals untouchables lower class

people all of those are imagined is

tainted by the dirt of the body let me

give you just some examples of how some

powerful examples of how this has been

used historically this comes from a Nazi

children’s book published in 1938 just

look at these guys the louse infested

beards the filthy protruding years those

stained fatty clothes Jews often have an

unpleasant Swedish odor if you have a

good nose you can smell the Jews a more

modern example comes from people who try

to convince us that homosexuality is

immoral this is from an anti-gay website

where they said gays are worthy of death

for their vile sex practices they’re

like dogs eating their own vomit and

sal’s walling in their own feces these

are discussed properties that are trying

to be directly linked to the social

group that you should not like when we

were first investigating the role of

disgust in moral judgment one of the

things we became interested in was

whether or not visa

these sorts of appeals are more likely

to work in individuals who are more

easily disgusted so while discussed

along with the other basic emotions are

universal phenomena it just really is

true that some people are easier to

discuss than others you could probably

see it in the audience members when I

showed you those disgusting images the

way that we measured this was by a scale

that was constructed by some other

psychologists it simply asked people

across a wide variety of situations how

likely they are to feel disgust so here

a couple of examples even if I were

hungry I would not drink a bowl of my

favorite soup it had been stirred by

used but thoroughly washed flyswatter do

you agree or disagree while you’re

walking through a tunnel under a

railroad track you smell urine would you

be very disgusted not at all disgusted

if you ask enough of these you can get a

general overall score of disgust

sensitivity it turns out that this score

is actually meaningful when you bring

people into the laboratory and you ask

them if they’re willing to engage in

safe but disgusting behaviors like a

eating chocolate that’s been baked to

look like dog poop or in this case

eating some meal worms that are

perfectly healthy but pretty gross your

score on that scale actually predicts

whether or not you’ll be willing to

engage in those behaviors the first time

that we set out to collect data on this

and associated with political or moral

beliefs we found a general pattern this

is with a psychologist coln bar and Paul

bloom that in fact across three studies

we kept finding that people who reported

that they were easily disgusted also

reported that they were more politically

conservative another way to say this

though is that people who were very

liberal are very hard to discuss

in a more recent follow-up study we were

able to look at a much greater sam much

larger sample in this case this is

nearly 30,000 us respondents and we find

the same pattern as you can see people

who are on the very conservative side of

answering the political orientation

scale are also much more likely to

report that they’re easily disgusted

this data set also allowed us to

statistically control for a number of

things that we knew were both related to

political orientation and to discuss

sensitivity so we were able to control

for gender age income education even

basic personality variables and the

result stays the same when we actually

looked at not just self-reported

political orientation but voting

behavior we were able to look

geographically across the nation what we

found was that in regions in which

people reported high levels of disgust

sensitivity McCain got more votes so it

not only predicted self-reported

political orientation but actual voting

behavior and also we were able with the

sample to look across the world 121

different countries we asked the same

questions and as you can see this is a

121 countries collapse into 10 different

geographical regions no matter where you

look what this is plotting is the size

of the relationship between disgust

sensitivity and political orientation

and no matter where we looked we saw a

very similar effect other labs have

actually looked at this as well using

different measures of disgust

sensitivity so rather than asking people

how easily discussed that they are they

hook people up to physiological measures

in this case skin conductance and what

they’ve demonstrated that people who

report being more politically

conservative are also more

physiologically aroused when you show

them disgusting images like the ones

that I showed you interestingly what

they also showed in a finding that we

kept getting in the in our previous

studies as well was that one of the

strongest influences here is that

individuals who are very discuss

sensitive not only are more likely to

report being politically conservative

but they’re also very much more opposed

to gay marriage and homosexuality and

pretty much a lot of the socio moral

issues in the sexual domain so

physiological arousal predicted in this

study attitudes toward gay marriage but

even with all these data linking discuss

sensitivity and political orientation

one of the questions that remains is

what is the causal link here is it the

case that discussed really is shaping

political and moral beliefs we have to

resort to experimental methods to answer

this and so what we can do is actually

bring people into lab and discuss them

and compare them to a control group that

hasn’t been disgusted it turns out that

over the past five years a number of

researchers have done this and by and

large the results have all been the same

that when people are feeling disgust

their attitudes shift toward the right

end of the political spectrum toward

more moral conservatism as well so this

is whether you use a foul odor a bad

taste from film clips from posthypnotic

suggestions of disgust images like the

ones I’ve shown you even just reminding

people that disease is prevalent they

should be wary of it and wash up right

to keep clean these all have similar

effects on judgement let me just give

you an example from a recent study that

we conducted we asked participants to

just simply give us their opinion of a

variety of social groups and we either

made the room smell gross or not when

the room smelled gross what we saw was

that individuals actually reported more

negative attitudes toward gay men

discuss didn’t influence attitudes

toward all the other social groups that

we asked including african-americans the

elderly it really came down to the

attitudes they had toward gay men in

another set of studies we actually

simply reminded people this was at a

time when the swine flu is going around

we reminded people that in order to

prevent the spread of the flu that they

ought to wash their hands for some

participants we actually had them take

questionnaires next to a sign that

reminded them to wash their hands and

what we found was that just taking a

questionnaire next to this hand

sanitizer reminder made individuals

report being more politically

conservative and when we asked them a

variety of questions about the rightness

or wrongness of certain acts what we

also found was that simply being

reminded that they ought to wash their

hand made them more morally conservative

in particular when we ask them questions

about sort of taboo but fairly harmless

sexual practices just being reminded

that they ought to wash their hand made

them think that they were more

morally wrong let me give you an example

of what I mean by harmless but taboo

sexual practice we gave them scenarios

one of them said a man is house-sitting

for his grandmother when his

grandmother’s away he has sex with his

girlfriend on his grandma’s bed in

another one we said a woman enjoys

masturbating with her favorite teddy

bear cuddle next to her people find

these to be more morally abhorrent if

they’ve been reminded to wash their

hands okay the fact that emotions

influence our judgment should come as no

surprise I mean that’s part of how

emotions work they not only motivate you

to behave in certain ways but they

change the way you think in the case of

disgust what is a little bit more

surprising is the scope of this

influence it makes perfect sense and

it’s a very good emotion for us to have

that disgust would make me change the

way that I perceive the physical world

whenever contamination is possible it

makes less sense that an emotion that

was built to prevent me from ingesting

poison should predict who I’m going to

vote for in the upcoming presidential

election the question of whether

discussed ought to influence our moral

and political judgments certainly has to

be complex and might depend on on

exactly what judgments were talking

about and as a scientist we have to

conclude sometimes that the scientific

method is just ill equipped to answer

these sorts of questions one thing that

I am fairly certain about is at the very

least what we can do with this research

is point to what questions we ought to

ask in the first place thank you