Are any social behaviors universally disgusting?

The best candidates for universal disgust solicitors are the ones that are closely linked to food and infection, but it looks like there may be themes on a social or moral level. Certain forms of deviant sex are considered disgusting, but what counts as deviant varies greatly from culture to culture. Sexual activity is the sort of thing that is more likely to get disgust brought to bear on it, but I’ve found a lot of different variations on that theme.

American popular culture seems to be captivated by things our culture finds disgusting. Why are we so drawn to “Saw” films and reality TV like “Fear Factor”?

People have asked me questions like this before, and from the point of view of my research, I don’t really know. The one thing I can say is that something you find disgusting will definitely capture your attention because we’re quite sensitized to them. Beyond simply having the ability to draw our attention, we tend to tell other people about things that are disgusting. Maybe this is a really cheap pandering to the audience that plays on these propensities we have.

Do we have the ability to change the things we feel disgusted by?

People don’t exactly know how this works, but acute exposure to something can have the effect of decreasing our feeling of disgust toward it. For example, if you go to medical school, you have to deal with corpses a lot because you’re learning human anatomy. As a result, your sensitivity to death-related solicitors [i.e. things] drops off a little. The key part of this, however, is that it is only for death-related disgust solicitors that the sensitivity decreases. Another example is that over time, mothers become less disgusted by the dirty diapers of their own child, but they remain disgusted by the dirty diapers of other peoples’ children. But what’s happening there isn’t conscious. It’s automatic. In general, there’s not a lot known about the ways we can deliberately or voluntarily make ourselves not be disgusted by things.

Do you think shows like “Bizarre Foods” can subconsciously help us to overcome some of our disgust of other cultures, like the fact that Cambodian people eat spiders?

It’s an interesting suggestion. Shows where people eat extremely outlandish foods from other cultures that Americans might find disgusting could be a way of familiarizing ourselves with something so it doesn’t seem so outlandish. It’s pure speculation, but familiarizing ourselves with things that are common in other cultures may be a way to fight the dehumanizing and xenophobic tendencies that come with feelings of disgust.

What about our friends and family? Can they teach us to stop being disgusted by something?

You would think that our peers have a lot of influence on what we find disgusting and what we don’t, but past a certain point, they may be fixed. Let’s say you grow up in the Midwest like I did, and you go to state fairs where you eat elephant ears and fried Twinkies. Then as an adult, you move to San Francisco where you hang out with people who find state fair food revolting. Can their social influence make you disgusted by the foods you used to love as a kid? I tend to think you can make an effort to present as though you’re disgusted by something or aren’t, but I don’t know that you can ever actually fully change your sensibilities once they get calibrated.

So someone might tell their friends they hate fried Twinkies then stuff their face with them when they visit their family in Indiana?

Exactly. You present one face to your coastal friends and another to your friends and family back home. But whether that gets down into the deeper psychological machinery isn’t something I know yet.

Can disgust be dangerous?

It’s an indisputable fact at this point that disgust influences a lot of social and moral judgments in a variety of ways. An interesting question is whether or not feelings of disgust should play a part in deliberate decision making. If a large percentage of the population finds some social practice disgusting — like stem cell research or cloning — is that a good reason to think the practice is immoral? I argue that it should not. A practice people are disgusted by may or may not be immoral, but the fact that people are disgusted by it is totally irrelevant to that particular question. We shouldn’t trust disgust to give us reliable information about morality. We know the story of how it evolved and why it varies from one culture to the next. Investing the emotion with moral authority is extremely dubious, and we shouldn’t uncritically trust it.

Does disgust play a role in creating social inequality? So gays and lesbians shouldn’t be denied the right to marry on the grounds that their so-called disgusting lifestyle undermines the sanctity of marriage?

The groups that are most likely to elicit disgust are often the lowest on the social hierarchy. Women have been made into objects of disgust a lot throughout history. Disgust can be a very powerful rhetorical tool to discredit, undermine or demonize an opponent or a group of people with whom you don’t agree. An easy way to do those things is to portray someone as infecting the integrity of your own social group. Disgust is a really potent emotion, and using it can be pretty rousing and effective because it has an almost subliminal influence on how we think of things.

Why not use it to make discrimination unfashionable?

I argue against disgust ever being used as a social tool, even to get rid of something we all logically agree is morally pernicious. It’s easy to imagine someone arguing that, since rational and calculated arguments haven’t done a lot to change public opinion about racism, maybe we should try portraying racism and racists as disgusting. The powerful influence of this emotion might help push racism to the edge of society or eliminate it altogether, but my response is that we still shouldn’t do it. It’s not ethically appropriate to deliberately depict any group of people as disgusting because disgust makes it very easy to dehumanize, and that would do the very thing we seek to undo.