Had Darwin spent as much time in a nursery as he had in the field, the study of disgust might have taken a much different turn. The key problem, as Freud and others later observed, is that humans don't really exhibit aversions towards most of what we consider disgusting--including our own excrement--until we are taught to. Even worse, those famous feral "wild children" plucked from the forests were often almost totally lacking a "nominal" capacity for disgust. Finally, our closest primate cousins, such as chimpanzees, fail to exhibit disgust of any kind, and many mammals routinely ingest feces to replenish the beneficial bacteria that they, like we, carry in their digestive tracts.
On closer examination, then, disgust appears to be a cultural acquisition: people are taught what is disgusting, when to be disgusted, and, if all goes right, how to avoid being disgusting themselves. Indeed, "disgust marks the boundaries of culture and boundaries of the self," University of Michigan law professor William Ian Miller noted in his recent book, The Anatomy of Disgust.
But is there more to the story?
Plunging head first into this and other murky questions about disgust is a small number of dedicated (and strong-stomached) researchers. Their undisputed leader: Paul Rozin. Ph.D.. a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania who has earned the label "Dr. Disgust" as a result of his untiring exploration of what grosses us out.
To the fundamental question of "nature versus nurture," Rozin's answer is blunt: "It's both." The "gape," one of the facial expressions Darwin described, is, he explains, indeed quite primal. "It derives from the `distaste face,' which humans share with rats. But it has now gone way beyond that."
Like rat pups, newborn humans will involuntarily reject certain tastes. At birth, this sense of distaste is centered not on excrement but on foods that are bitter or sour or are, like chili peppers, irritating or painful.
What happens next is hazy. According to Rozin, at some point between ages four and eight we develop an acquired sense of disgust that is different from this innate sense of distaste. Just as we learn to like some tastes that we earlier rejected, like spicy foods, we learn to hate things we might have previously been interested in--most importantly, what we have been taught to flush and never discuss at the dinner table.
ARSENIC AND OLD WASTE
How does this new disgust response differ from the earlier rejection based on taste? Imagine three glasses of tap water. You are told that the water in the first glass contains an odorless, harmless chemical that is terribly bitter to the taste. The second glass is laced with a lethal dose of arsenic. The third glass, perfectly sterile and containing pure water, previously held a sample of dog feces but had been washed thoroughly.
Which glass would you drink?
This taste test, similar to an actual trial used by Rozin, suggests that disgust is about something much bigger than unpleasant tastes, smells, or sights. "Disgust," explains Rozin, "involves rejection based not on sensory properties, but on knowledge of the nature of something." And it is not necessarily about fear of injury or sickness. Knowing about the poison in the second glass incites' a different, less violent reaction than knowing what used to be in the third. In fact, the difference between simple fear and disgust is as startling as it is stark: roughly speaking, if fear is our response to real or perceived harm to our physical selves, disgust is, in a sense, the reaction to actual or imagined threats to our souls.
ALL DISGUSTS GREAT AND SMALL
A good deal of research has involved the search for what experts call "core disgust." There is now general agreement that a "core" group of disgusts does exist, and Rozin and April Fallon, Ph.D., have identified three criteria that separate such "core" disgusts from things that are disgusting in some less profound way. To gain membership in the core disgust club, the candidate must be all of the following: something you could eat; something that has or had a life of its own; and something that has the power to make other things disgusting.
IT'S IN YOUR FACE. Freud saw disgust as an artificial response designed to tame children's sexuality. But he was, in this case, way off. In the 1940s, psychotherapist Andras Angyal argued that the mouth is crucial to disgust, and subsequent researchers have concluded that it is mainly an oral defense. "Disgust starts with food," says Jonathan Haidt, Ph.D., once a student of Rozin's and now an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, "and then moves on to other things, sex being just one of them."
IT'S ALIVE. Rozin and Fallon note that disgusting things are most likely to be, or are perceived to be, of animal origin, whether it's an actual critter or one of its body products. Also high in offensiveness are animals that eat other animals, wastes or decaying food, and animals like spiders and sea creatures that seem bizarre and alien.
Tags:
airplane,
beverage cart,
committing suicide,
criminal complaint,
fellow passengers,
flight attendant,
gerard finneran,
indiscretion,
international flight,
investment banker,
likelihood,
linen napkins,
lobster,
newspaper editors,
rampage,
roach,
surprising reasons,
tabloid,
toilet paper
