AND IT'S SPREADING. Rozin and his colleagues contend that a central property of core disgust is that the object deemed offensive is capable of "contaminating" other objects--even if the person sensing this contamination knows that it's just an illusion. For example, while you might hate carrots with a burning passion, you are unlikely to reject a bowl of mashed potatoes because a carrot stick had fallen into it and been fished out. But what about a bowl of potatoes touched momentarily by an ugly but thoroughly sterilized cockroach? And what if the bowl of roach-"contaminated" potatoes is added to a larger bowl of potatoes? If the law "once in contact, always in contact" applies, a core disgust has likely been triggered.
Working with the foundation of core disgust, Rozin, Haidt, and Clark McCauley, Ph.D., have sought to isolate different kinds of disgust, to create a "pantheon" of other disgusting things, people, and practices, and to create useful tests (See "How Much Can You Stomach?" page 42) to measure a person's disgust sensitivity. To do this, they've broken down disgust into several distinct categories: foods or potential foods; body products; certain animals; death (e.g. contact with corpses); poor hygiene; certain sexual practices; "violations of the exterior `envelope' of the human body" (such as amputations or over-the-top body piercings); and certain moral offenses or offensive people.
LOVE IS THE ANSWER
The vagueness of what people find sexually disgusting was illustrated in an episode of the popular TV sitcom Friends, when one of the show's twenty-something bachelorettes discovered that, to her horror, the mature-looking beau whom she had just had sex with was, in fact, not even old enough to vote. Why, why, why, the spurned teen wanted to know, was Monica suddenly rejecting him? "Because," she stammered, "it's icky."
Monica's eloquent explanation notwithstanding, the fact is that sex itself--all sex--is potentially disgusting. After all, just making out usually involves exchanging gobs of spit with someone else. When we have sex, Rozin notes, we temporarily "suspend" our capacity for disgust, something most of us will do only under certain circumstances. "Except for very promiscuous males who will stick their tongues in the mouths of virtually any woman," he says, "imagined sexual encounters with most other people are usually considered offensive." We're talking about realistically imagined scenarios with ordinary people here, not fantasies of sanitized sex with airbrushed supermodels. And sex gets really disgusting when it is judged deviant--when, as in Monica's case, one partner is extremely young or old or, in rare cases, isn't even human.
Which brings up an even murkier issue.
We've all called someone "disgusting" for doing something brutish or insensitive--for example, when we call an ambulance-chasing lawyer "disgusting." It's tempting to dismiss this as an altogether different phenomenon from "normal" disgust. But intriguingly, in most cultures the same word used to describe feces and decay is also applied to morally-dubious acts--what Haidt and Arizona State University psychologist Carol Nemeroff, Ph.D., call "sociomoral disgusts." While physical disgust is usually pretty similar around the world, sociomoral disgust varies widely by culture.
Still, despised acts and the people who commit them can be hated and considered immoral without being at all disgusting. The puzzle for psychologists is to pinpoint where "contempt" leaves off and disgust begins.
DID HITLER HAVE COOTIES?
Would you wear Jeffrey Dahmer's sweater? Adolf Hitler's? How about Saddam Hussein's?
One test for defining or measuring sociomoral disgust is to determine whether an object touched or owned by a "disgusting" person can reliably elicit disgust. A variation on the roach-in-the-potatoes concept, the sweater test suggests that genuinely disgusting people have an ability to "contaminate" objects that they touch or own, and, more narrowly, that this contamination can be perceived as a germ-like threat--a form of "spiritual pollution"--even by someone who knows that no real danger exists. In kindergarten terms, someone is disgusting when rational adults act as if this person has "cooties."
"If we feel contempt for someone, the sweater can't hurt us," says Nemeroff. "But when we feel disgust, we want to clutch our bodies and say, `Oh god, I don't want it near me.' It is disgusting when there is a spiritual threat, a sense of horror at the idea of the evil person's stuff getting inside of you."
Generally, only those who do things that no normal person would ever do risk being considered, and not just called, disgusting. Says Rozin: "Some serial killers are despicable but not disgusting; they are just regular killers. But by eating his victims' hearts and so forth, Jeffrey Dahmer became disgusting."
CANNIBALS VS. TAX CHEATS
Is there a common link that bridges such disgusting but seemingly unrelated notions as an unflushed toilet, a dead body, a visit to a slaughterhouse, and a neighbor who commits incest or cannibalism?
The answer, insist Rozin and his colleagues, is simple: each area of disgust is, in its own way, a jarring reminder of our animal nature. The things that most disgust us--defecating, dying, giving birth, eating dubious or unclean foods--are the very traits we most conspicuously share with other animals.
Perhaps it's no coincidence that the only body product we generally don't find disgusting is tears--the only one considered uniquely human.
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