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