Physical 03: The Co-opting of Disgust

    For a while now I have been plotting a blog post about my thoughts on the emotion of offense (that is, taking offense to something someone else says or does.) However, I realized that before I could do that, I would first need to lay some groundwork down about another, related emotion, disgust, and its psychological and cultural origins.

   From psychology.wikia.com: "Disgust is an emotion that is typically associated with things that are unclean, inedible, or infectious." It is thought to be a uniquely human emotion - we are not aware of any other animals that feel revulsion in the same way we do.

    Why might we develop such an unpleasant-feeling emotion? It seems common-sense enough: many of the things we find disgusting are quite harmful to us. Feces, mucus, blood, urine, vomit, raw and decomposing meats - all of these things can potentially carry infectious diseases or could otherwise make us ill. The feeling of disgust is akin to the feeling of nausea, and the facial expressions we make when we are extremely disgusted mimic those expressions we have if we are about to vomit. No coincidence there - getting sick by these things often leads us to feel sick and throw up!

    Disgust is not just a genetic phenomenon, however. In one of my classes in which we talked about Freud, the teacher remarked that in infant's and toddler's "anal stage" they frequently play with their own feces. It is the parents that express their disgust at the child's action. The parent's disgust for the early child's natural body functions translates into a sense of shame on the part of the child, which as they grow older helps reinforces specific rituals for that body function. The child is potty trained.

    You might be starting to see where I'm going here. So far, we've only talked about issues for which there is a clear health hazard. However, the fact that feelings of disgust are intertwined with some of our social norms leads us to ask what effect disgust plays with moral judgments. Psychological studies have shown there to be a strong connection between these - in "Disgust as Embodied Moral Judgment," Schnall shows that inducing the feeling of disgust in participants lead them to make harsher moral judgments. People who claim that, for instance, sodomy or especially homosexuality is sinful frequently express themselves in terms of disgust towards the act, even though it has been scientifically established that these acts are not more intrinsically harmful than procreative heterosexual sex¹.

    The point I want to make here, and that I will make in my post about offense, is that while it is clear why disgust was a useful emotion in the development of our species, the fact is we have much better methods of determining what is and is not healthy. You might still rely on standard potty training techniques when the child is little, but you don't need to teach them that their bodies are inherently shameful when they come to the age of reason - simply explain that feces can carry infectious diseases, and that unprotected sex can lead to sexually transmitted diseases.


1:  Actually, procreative sex can be a more risky proposition than sodomy. What if the parents do not have the resources to support a child at that point in their lives?