If an emotion is a feeling or “vibe” that dictates behavior, then disgust is one of our most powerful emotions!
A growing body of research, has revealed the profound power of disgust, showing that this emotion is a much more potent trigger for our behavior and choices than we ever thought. The results play out in all sorts of unexpected areas, such as politics, the judicial system and our spending habits.
The triggers also affect some people far more than others, and often without their knowledge. Disgust, once dubbed “the forgotten emotion of psychiatry”, is being looked at with interest.
Disgust, you may know, is among the so-called ‘basic emotions’ which are recognizable by facial expressions in all races and all societies, even the least advanced. They are the fundamental building blocks of our emotional constitution.
Ekman & Friesen (1982) put forward a list of seven basic emotions commonly judged from still photographs of posed facial behavior, namely:
- surprise
- interest
- anger
- disgust/contempt
- happiness
- sadness
- fear.
They qualified this list by pointing out that it is not supposed to represent all emotions, merely the ones that can be discerned from facial appearances, minus any other expressions. One may question the inclusion of surprise as an emotion. Certainly it is a facial appearance but it can appear at many levels on this scale, including surprise happiness and surprise fear (shock), which are wide apart.
Why Disgust?
Disgust is experienced by all humans, typically accompanied by a puckered-lipped facial expression. It is generally accepted that it evolved to protect us from illness and death. Before we had modern medicine, disgust prevented us from getting too close to contagion.
Also, the sense of revulsion makes us shy away from biologically harmful things like vomit, feces, rotting meat and, to a certain extent, insects.
But it seems to be more than that. Workers now think that disgust plays a deeper role in people’s everyday behavior. It has to do with morality. In 2001, psychologist Jonathan Haidt at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, published a landmark paper proposing that instinctive gut feelings, rather than logical reasoning, are what govern our judgments of right and wrong. Haidt and colleagues used hypnosis to generate subliminal sense of disgust and found that it increased the severity of people’s moral judgments about shoplifting or political bribery, for example (Psychological Science, vol 16, p 780).
Since then, a number of studies have illustrated the unexpected ways in which disgust can influence our notions of right and wrong.
In 2008, Simone Schnall, now at the University of Cambridge, showed that placing people in a room with an unacknowledged aroma of fart spray and a filthy desk increased the moral indignation about, say, whether it’s OK to eat your dead pet dog (Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, vol 34, p 1096) One would think that decisions are made about whether a behavior is right or wrong only based on the pros and cons and arriving at a balanced judgment. Apparently not!
In fact it seems that the quicker you are to be disgusted, the more pompous, moralizing and supercilious you are likely to be. More conservative, perhaps?
Together, these findings raise all sorts of interesting, and troubling, questions about people’s prejudices, and the ways in which they might be influenced or even deliberately manipulated. Humanity already has a track record of using disgust as a weapon against “outsiders” – lower castes, immigrants and homosexuals. Nazi propaganda notoriously depicted Jewish people as filthy rats.
Fart Spray
So researchers tested smelly fart spray, to see how it influenced peoples’ judgment of others.
They made a room stink and had two group fill out questionnaires: one group in the disgusting room and one in a clean, odor-free room.
The questionnaire ask test subjects to rate their feelings of warmth towards various social groups, such as the elderly or homosexuals. The researchers didn’t mention the pong to the participants, who were a mix of heterosexual male and female US college students.
It turned out that not, while the unpleasant odor didn’t color many replies, it did seem to induce less warmth towards homosexual men compared to participants in a non-smelly room. The effect was of equal strength among political liberals and conservatives (Emotion, vol 12, p 23).
This finding is consistent with previous studies showing that a stronger susceptibility to disgust is linked with disapproval of gay people.
What could be a problem in courts of law. Sophieke Russell, at the University of Kent in Canterbury, UK, showed that once people feel a sense of disgust, it is difficult for them to take into account mitigating factors important in the process of law, such as the intentions of the people involved in a case. Disgust also clouds a juror’s judgment more than feelings of anger.
I agree with philosopher Martha Nussbaum at the University of Chicago Law School, that we should stop using the “politics of disgust” as a basis for legal judgements. She argues instead for John Stuart Mill’s principle of harm, whereby crimes are judged solely on the basis of the harm they cause.
I like John Stuart Mill. But unfortunately, disgust could never be eliminated from trials, because this would mean never exposing the jury to descriptions of crimes or pictures of crime scenes.
Disgust Can Mess With You Financially
Here’s a telling lesson. Jennifer Lerner and colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University showed that a feeling of disgust can cause people to sell their property at knock-down prices. After watching a revolting scene from the film Trainspotting (plenty of those in this movie), they sold a pack of pens for an average of $2.74, compared with a price of $4.58 for participants shown a neutral clip of coral reefs.
Incidentally, the disgusted participants denied being influenced by the Trainspotting clip, and instead justified their actions with more rational reasons.
So Should We Dispense With Disgust?
It’s one emotion it would be nice never to feel. But does it have any value?
Some would argue that instead of trying to overcome our sense of disgust, we should listen to our gut feelings and be guided by them. The physician Leon Kass, who was chairman of George W. Bush’s bioethics council from 2001 to 2005, has made the case for the “wisdom of repugnance” (well, he would have to come up with something like that, if he worked for Bush!)
“Repugnance is the emotional expression of deep wisdom, beyond reason’s power to fully articulate it,” he wrote in his 2002 book Life, Liberty and the Defense of Dignity.
But is he right?
Whether he is or not, it’s very possible to override disgust and we should try to come up with reasons independent of this reflexive gut reaction.
In general, women tend to be more easily disgusted than men, and are far more likely to be disgusted about sex. Women are also particularly sensitive to disgust in the early stages of pregnancy or just after ovulation – both times when their immune system is dampened.
The Ew! Factor
The young are more likely to be influenced by the Ew! factor, and we tend to become less easily disgusted as we grow old. This could boil down to the fact that our senses become less acute with age, or perhaps it is simply that older people have had more life experience and take a more rational view of potential threats.
Probably the number one way to become desensitized, as with most emotions, is continued exposure over time. For example, while feces (sh*t) is the most potent disgust trigger, it’s amazing how easy it is to overcome it when you have to deal with your own offspring’s bowel movements several times a day.
And psychologists have shown that after spending months dissecting bodies, medical students become less sensitive to disgust relating to death and bodily deformity (I can confirm that—but also the smell of formaldehyde carries the message of death, for the rest of one’s life).
One useful tidbit of research to emerge is that you can stifle disgust by avoiding the associated facial movements. You can prevent people from making that snarled-lip expression when they experience disgust – by simply asking them to hold a pencil between their lips – you can reduce their feeling of disgust when they are made to view revolting images.
Context Counts
A revolting smell can be disgusting but this identical smell may no longer seem repellant, once its origin is known.
That’s good news for the French who manufacture stinky cheeses. Without knowing what you are smelling, an odor may give an impression of sweaty feet bathed in vomit. But once you know it’s a nice, savory Pont L’Eveque or Livarot, the smell immediately becomes quite appealing!
“With smell, the meaning is based on context much more so than with vision,” says smell researcher Rachel Herz, author of the book That’s Disgusting. In other words, a vomit smell in an alley beside a bar will immediately conjure up a mental picture of a disgusting source, but exactly the same aroma would evoke deliciousness in a fine restaurant, she says.
The influence of culture on disgust isn’t limited to food. Kissing is public is seen as distasteful in India, whereas Brits are more revolted by mistreatment of animals.
Using a selection of disgusting images, Valerie Curtis at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine discovered a universal disgust towards feces, with vomit, pus, spit and a variety of insects following close behind in the revulsion stakes.
Yuck!