Oren asks: How do we know what to get mad at? Is it genetic or is it all a matter of culture?
Disgust, along with fear, anger, joy, sadness and surprise belongs to a very small group of "basic emotions" - those that we are born with the ability to feel and that we will recognize on the faces of strangers from any culture. In order for a stimulus to disgust us, it must meet three conditions: be something that can in principle be eaten, be something living or derived from a living creature, and be "contagious", meaning cause what comes into contact with it to be disgusting: both the cockroach, the sugar it stood on, and a cup of coffee that was sweetened in the same Sugar will make us sick.
The biological approach: is disgust inherent in genes?
Already Charles Darwin noticed that the expression of nausea is universal: the eyebrows draw closer to each other, there are hand and body movements that seek to distance or defend against the stimulus, the mouth opens and often the person spits or blows forcefully as if to remove from the mouth everything that might be in it. The facial expression is similar to the one before vomiting: the lower lip stretches, the nose wrinkles and the upper lip rises. The secretion of saliva decreases and with it the activity of the nerves responsible for the movement of the tongue. Unlike fear, disgust is accompanied by a decrease in heart rate. According to Valerie Curtis, nausea is An automatic response designed for us by evolution to maintain hygiene. The history of hygiene, Curtis claims, begins almost with the beginning of life on Earth. As plants and creatures that feed on them appeared, animals also evolved that chose other animals as food. An animal that feeds on animals smaller than itself is called a predator, while an animal that feeds on an animal larger than itself is called a parasite. The emotional expression of the defense against madmen is fear, while disgust is the product of the evolution of the defense against parasites. Disgust is a strong motive to avoid contact with dirt and "dirt" is defined as something from which there is a chance of being infected with various parasites: from viruses and bacteria to worms and lice. Hygiene, it turns out, is not unique to humans and even primitive animals like worms (whose nervous system includes only about 300 cells) are able to recognize and avoid contact with bacteria. Curtis goes so far as to challenge the convention that denies humans instincts, she sees our repulsion from bodily secretions, corpses, and rotten food as a behavior that is inherent in us and is automatically activated by environmental stimulation, that is, an instinct for everything. To test this far-reaching hypothesis, a questionnaire was built based on pairs of images: one of the images shows an object that has the potential to be infected with an infectious disease and the other is similar to it but does not represent a risk of infection. For example, the questionnaire shows a picture of a plate with a viscous liquid that is blue in color and a picture similar to it but the liquid is yellowish and stained red and the examinee must indicate how disgusting it would be to touch each one. Similarly, the questionnaire includes a picture of a wasp and a picture of a louse, a picture of butterfly larvae and a picture of worms, an empty train car and the same car full of people, etc. The questionnaire was presented online to sample people from different cultures. In accordance with the "hygienic instinct" hypothesis, people were more disgusted by images representing the potential for infection, women reported stronger feelings of disgust (as expected from someone who was designed by evolution to protect both herself and her children from disease), young people were more disgusted than adults and the disgust in most cases was universal and did not differentiate between cultures Various. Another question presented to the researchers was: with whom would you be particularly reluctant to share a toothbrush from a list of options representing different degrees of closeness. About 60% of those surveyed answered that they would not agree to brush with the same brush as the postman, a quarter would be most disgusted by the boss at work, but only 3% answered that their brother's toothbrush would be the most repulsive and only 2% chose their partner as the worst toothbrushing partner. The researchers see this result as a reinforcement of the thesis they proposed because as the distance increases, so does the chance of finding new bacteria on the toothbrush. Evolution has also provided us with the possibility to turn off the nausea when necessary: when the sexual desire arises, the nausea disappears from the body fluids. In a particularly bizarre experiment, researcher Trevor I. Case gathered mothers and babies and asked them to sniff dirty diapers. The mothers rated the smell of their sons' feces as less repulsive than the smell of the produce of other babies even when they did not know whose diaper belonged to and even when they were intentionally misled into thinking that the diaper belonged to another child. The action and the statement attributed to Rabbi Moshe Leib of Sasov "He who cannot suck the pus from the wound of a child from Israel who is sick with the disease, has not yet reached half the level of loving Israel" can be interpreted as heroism or self-sacrifice, but the rabbi himself interprets it in a way that is consistent with the biological insight - as an expression of family closeness "An orphaned baby is commanded to be loved more than his own body - and have you ever seen a person in your life who was sick of his flesh, even leprosy flourished in him?"
And maybe it's all cultural conventions?
As expected, this purely biological approach to disgust is far from being agreed upon, there are those who doubt not only the existence of a "disgust instinct" but even the very definition of disgust as a fundamental emotion and reduces it to the level of a feeling like pain, hunger or fatigue.
Psychologists and sociologists see disgust first of all as a learned response. If indeed the aversion to dirt is inherent in our genes, they ask, why should children be taught to maintain cleanliness? Disgust is the fastest emotion to develop in babies. While anger or fear is already evident in infancy, aversion to bodily secretions only appears around the age of two and a half, and cockroaches will only produce disgust two years later and disgusting human behavior will only arouse disgust from the age of 7 or so. Even though every human culture has disgusting things, it is the culture that determines what is edible and what is disgusting. Freud saw disgust as a means by adults to control and restrain sexuality in small children. Psychologists after him rejected this assumption because the disgust is directed first of all to food and is led mainly by the chemical senses: smell and taste. The "dirt" is defined, according to this approach, not as a potential source of diseases but as a product of a sorting and social assessment system. Society creates a set of rules and dirt is something that is "out of place". This approach is associated with the anthropologist Mary Douglas (Mary Douglas Sees disgust as a means of instilling the system of social conventions. This is how, for example, the caste system in India is preserved through the sense of disgust of the members of the higher castes against the "impure". Psychologist Paul Rozin sees disgust as a response to a threat to our "self-determination" as human beings. Disgust maintains the boundaries by keeping us away from the living and the dead. Disgust, therefore, often arises from animals and the only bodily fluid that does not arouse disgust is also the only one whose animal secretion we do not witness: tears. In a similar way, disgust keeps us away from "inhuman" behaviors such as open incest or cannibalism.
Most researchers try to combine the biological and cultural approaches: it is agreed that humans are born with the ability to feel nausea and recognize nausea in others. There are tastes that repel babies and they react with clear gestures of disgust to them. But nausea is also a "plastic" emotion that is easy to shape according to social conventions. There is an evolutionary sense in this flexibility: if everyone around you is eating something, it is probably safe and it is better not to consume food that those with experience stay away from. Every human culture uses our ability to recognize disgust and disgust to reinforce social conventions. Nausea is more suitable than fear to distance us from unacceptable behavior because it is easier to overcome fear than to overcome disgust: we are not afraid of stuffed animals of prey but the disgust of a cockroach is preserved even when it is cooked and sterile. This is how a sense of disgust is learned from menstrual blood that preserves the laws of nida and a disgust learned from body hair sustains a thriving industry of plucking. Some regard with disgust the evolutionary father of human morality. The muscle that lifts the upper lip, wrinkles the nose and creates the characteristic expression of disgust is the levator labii And it is activated in the same way when we watch an image of pollution, when we feel a repulsive taste and when we are exposed to bullying and inconsiderate behavior. When you break down human morality into parts, it seems that disgust is linked to the branches of morality whose role is to maintain internal cohesion in the group: loyalty, acceptance of authority and especially purity. Disgust is less involved in the individual branches of morality: fairness and helping the weak. The element of "purity" is the least rational of the elements of morality: it is impossible to formulate it as a law that will be accepted by every reasonable person. This is the branch of morality that causes us to maintain the dignity of the dead and reject behaviors that apparently do not harm the rights of people or the community: necrophilia, sleeping with a beast or consensual incest between brothers. People with a strong tendency to be disgusted tend to a conservative moral concept in which the purity component is significant and they tend to oppose, for example, homosexual rights. Those who follow the ongoing struggle these days over the right of access to Nahal Hasi can see how "fence keepers" when they ask for public support appeal to the feeling of disgust when they emphasize the pollution (excreta, leftover food) that the ugly Israeli will bring with him to the banks of the river and plastic depictions of the "Mosquito-infested swamp" that was there before them. This is an effective public relations operation because disgust is a strong and stable mechanism designed by evolution to make us freeze in place and reject the unfamiliar: in both the biological and social worlds.
Thanks to: Dr. Valerie Curtis, Dr. Trevor Case, Dr. Kent A. Kiehl for their help
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