The Monkey Cage

(In case you’re not sure, those are maggots.)

Disgust is a peculiar emotion, readily elicited by a simple smell, sound, sight,or even word. …[I]t’s difficult to even talk about disgust without becoming disgusted. The mere thought of disgust elicitors such as maggots, pus, or putrid meat can turn one’s stomach. …Rather than arising solely as a reaction to noxious stimuli, disgust is also intimately involved in shaping moral perceptions of specific groups and acts.

That’s Yoel Inbar, David Pizarro, and Paul Bloom, writing in the current issue of Cognition & Emotion (pay-gated; pre-publication copy here).*

How does disgust shape “moral perceptions of specific groups and acts”? And for whom?

According to many liberal, educated Westerners, … whether a practice or behaviour is considered morally palatable or reprehensible should depend on whether that behaviour harms or infringes on the rights of another individual; disgusting but harmless behaviours do not deserve moral condemnation. According to this view, consuming faecal matter, engaging in sexual intercourse with animals, or masturbating to pornography is not immoral, as long as no other people are harmed by one’s behaviour.

However, this view of disgusting acts as morally innocuous is a fairly recent invention. The vast majority of cultures, past and present, have recognised purity as an important moral dimension. Behaviours that are seen as degrading, defiling, or unnatural reduce purity and are thus immoral even if they do not harm oneself or others. Therefore, disgust — the emotion most often elicited by breaches of purity — is seen as morally relevant and informative.

So if you witness disgusting behavior, you judge the person performing that behavior to be morally deficient — unless you’re a liberal, educated westerner, in which case you may suspend moral judgment if the behavior in question is having harmful effects on others.

With these thoughts in mind, Inbar, Pizarro, and Bloom set out to determine whether “a heightened general proclivity to feel disgust might be associated with more conservative views.” To find out, they asked participants in an opt-in internet survey to respond to a set of disgust-related statements (e.g., ‘‘I try to avoid letting any part of my body touch the toilet seat in a public restroom, even when it appears clean’’) and to rate a set of events ((e.g., ‘‘You take a sip of soda and then realise that you picked up the wrong can, which a stranger had been drinking out of’’) in terms of how disgusting they would be. Thus measured, and with the effects of other pertinent factors taken into account, disgust sensitivity proved to be a significant predictor of self-identified political conservatism.

In a follow-up study, college students were asked to state their positions on a wide array of policy issues (gay marriage, abortion, gun control, labour unions, bombing Iran, welfare, Iraq war, affirmative action, tax cuts, and the death penalty), with the researchers’ expectation being that disgust sensitivity would strongly predict responses to the “purity”-related issues (gay marriage and abortion), but that this effect would be weaker for the other items. That expectation was borne out, except that more disgust-sensitive respondents also expressed expressed greater support for tax cuts; apparently, then, taxes were no less disgusting to these respondents than were gay marriage and abortion.

What are we to make of all this? Although Inbar, Pizarro, and Bloom are appropriately cautious about overstating their case, they leave little question about what they perceive to be the underlying causal dynamic:

Does disgust sensitivity cause conservatism?. The current data cannot speak to the causal relationship between political attitudes and disgust sensitivity. It might be that no simple relationship is there to be found,
though it does seem unlikely that political attitudes would shift a person’s general emotional dispositions, particularly when it comes to disgust, a basic emotion that emerges long before individuals form political attitudes.

As I think about this study, I find myself questioning Inbar, Pizarro,and Bloom’s contention that fundamental emotional dispositions are formed long before fundamental political dispositions like receptivity to change and openness toward unconventional acts. That is, I tend to view such fundamental dispositions as parts of the same package rather than in cause-and-effect terms, and I’m therefore much more conservative even than Inbar, Pizarro, and Bloom (though I’m not disgusted by them) about whether their results do anything at all to clarify the sources of political dispositions.

*I was alerted to this article by an item in the Washington Post’s “Science Digest” column today.