The feeling of disgust, and where it comes from | Hacker News Reader

The feeling of disgust, and where it comes from

nautil.us

45 pointsdnetesn36 comments

This article is a little light. If you're actually interested in scholarship around the topic, Jonathan Haidt has a lot of great writing around how deep seated "gut" feelings like disgust drive our moral judgements. I would highly recommend his books and papers.

The Righteous Mind is a good starting place for this topic.

This reminds me of the finding that viewing homosexual male activity triggers serious physiological stress to heterosexual men independently of prejudice[1]. The response is entirely involuntary.

I've also heard that people on the political right have a much higher disgust sensitivity than people on the left, but I suspect that's not nearly as meaningful as it first sounds due to the artificiality of forcing the diversity of moral and political opinions along a single axis based on French politics at the time of the Revolution.

[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/19419899.2017.13...

Jordan Peterson (red flag, I know!) talks about how disgust is actually one of the oldest emotional centers in the brain and is an incredibly distinct emotion from fear. He mentions that most people think that reactionary conservative thinking is driven by fear, but he thinks it is actually driven by people’s innate ability to feel disgusted and how that emotion pours over from physical disgust of feces, rot, maggots, etc. to more social and abstract forms. Some people innately feel this more strongly than others, but you can also train yourself to be less disgusted. It bears out if you have ever seen someone who is what I might call “physically bigoted”, i.e. their body seems to have an intense physical reaction to people of different races or classes. Think about how fundamentalists really hate gay sex (or even slightly kinky “adultery”)— their actions aren’t driven by a logical process, the thought of it is so disgusting that they are repulsed by it’s very existence.

I find this interesting because of how disgust has been used in the past and present as a rhetorical device for various social movements. Hitlers speeches about keeping a strong aryan race centered around analogies of disease, filth, and purity. Covid and covid coverage certainly latches onto people’s deep desires to stay away from the diseases as well. There are logical reasons to want people to wear masks but I think the feeling goes deeper for some. A certain kind of lefty thinks right wing states are a plague ship full of untouchables. On the other hand, right wingers have latched on to the “Chinese virus” narrative, and attempt to humanize Asian people is seen as naively/maliciously allowing disease spreaders into the community by conservatives.

I guess my point is that we might be better off to be intentionally and rationally disgusted wherever possible, and should be aware that this incredibly strong emotion can be used to manipulate us.

Not sure why you were downvoted, but thanks. I'm no Jordan Peterson fan, but I appreciate your thoughtful comment :)

Thanks. I try to take the medicine from the poison with regards to JP. Maps of Meaning really helped me fling myself out of a depression as an aspie-kind of a guy. I had such calm and reasoned thoughts of meaninglessness, a kind of zen-depression-nihilist-nothingness. I wasn’t crying or staying in bed all day, but I couldn’t be bothered to care about any aspect of my life. I already don’t like people, hobbies were pointless, work a sisyphantian task, etc. His book was great because it was an academic look into why meaning is important at the basest level of existence, and how it is basically ones responsibility to have a full life by /injecting/ meaning into the world—the more the better! Then I kind of saw through to the anti-progressive undertones and hung up the phone as it were, but I owe him a lot.

I am really really glad I replied to your comment. My day is better for hearing that you got yourself out of a shitty time, and I'm kinda touched by your story :) Thanks a ton for sharing it!

What is it about the anti-progressive undertones, to use your language, that caused you to stop reading him?

Well if you’re still here to read my response, he believes really strongly that a strong sense of individual responsibility and personal freedom (as in liberty) is the only path to happiness. I live in a kind of a commune and I’ve never been happier, so I know that this is false first-hand, and it shows that he’s using his science to promote his political agenda. This is fine, but he really plays off his ideas as fundamental truths instead of opinions.

It isn’t any single thing he says but kind of the underlying ideology of his writing and speech. He says bad things about the right wing but the. mostly says it’s due to personality differences. Right wing people are less open, more conscientious, etc. But when he says something bad about left wing thinking it isn’t due to personality but a giant moral failing and disaster of democracy. It’s kind of like attribution error but applied to political thinking.

I can’t rally point to any one thing but if you listen to his lectures on personality you’ll get what I’m talking about. He really does have so much worthwhile to say about ontology and social interaction that I think he’s worth it, he just shouldn’t be anyone’s guru.

Thanks for the reply, insightful.

People have that feeling of disgust towards JP.

I don't understand how. JP is best known for being a (believe it or not, relatively left-wing) psychologist teaching young adults the virtue of responsibility. What is wrong with that?

Progressives don’t like responsibility because it is complicated to balance talk of personal responsibility with that of social justice. The hardest part of being a minority is that one can blame almost all of ones ills on the state of society, and be correct to do so, but in doing so one loses personal control over ones life in the day-to-day. We have to act as if we have responsibility even if we don’t, just to be sane. It’s the same line of thinking as believing in free will. If you don’t believe in it deep down you will almost certainly fall into a depression.

But right-wing rhetoric flips the script and says of course we have to act with responsibility, because we /really are/ responsible at the lowest level of reality. If your life isn’t going well then that’s your responsibility to fix it and yours alone. Minorities and poor people hear this and either beat themselves up or reject it outright, since it is a half-truth at best.

So now talking about responsibility is tied up with bigotry, which I think is really unfortunate.

Conservatives don't like responsibility for themselves tho. Only for those they perceive as others.

The Hitlers speaches about aryan strength centered on aryan strenght and history and such. They had feel good and feel powerfuly strong element. They were motivating to target audience. He was in business of building powerful Reich, that required vision of strength and victory, not just threat.

He did had also speeches about Jews being Marxists and pest and disease. That was favourite topic too.

But the sentence itself is just something someone who is bluffing and hoping for best would say.

I kind of suspect that part about disgust being oldest center of brain turns out similar "sounds good but not really" nonsense.

Has anyone noticed that almost all mammals have the same "disgust" expression with the wrinkled snout?

I think you're referring to the Flehmen response: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flehmen_response

Seems to be similar to the "bass face" of appreciation: https://i.imgur.com/uVSSTSD.png

Disgust is intimately tied to the defense against disease and pathogens, and the wrinkled snout/nose serves the function of closing down the airways to prevent pathogens from getting inside.

Jordan Peterson has an excellent series of lectures regarding disgust sensitivity, here's a sample:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiDmfb6M4Vk

This isn’t actually known to be true though, is it? It seems like a compelling hypothesis, but rejection of external objects is only universal as far as our physical responses rather than emotional.

For example, something threatening might be purged from the mouth, stomach, or intestines. This is something all humans do.

Something undesirable to eat or drink won’t universally trigger a specific facial expression, sound, or feeling.

Further, if I wrinkle my nose in disgust it actually flairs my nostrils, seemingly making it easier to breathe and smell. I suspect this is the same for most humans, but I’m open to correction. It simply has no limiting effect on my ability to breathe or smell, though.

These are important distinctions, and distinctions which make Peterson’s claim less than factual from my point of view.

There’s a great conversation about this on the Making Sense podcast. It touches on this idea exactly, and why we really don’t understand what emotional elements of expression truly mean or where they come from. Things like disgust contain a cultural or environmental element which appear to lack attachment to solely genetic origins.

https://samharris.org/subscriber-rss/?uid=PNISESQukqqj4q8

Wrinkled snout/nose does not close the airways nor prevents pathogens from getting inside.

I have to admit that if it would, covid would be way funnier. But, it does not. J

I was surprised to find there had been no overarching study on mammalian facial interactions until recently [0]. Supposedly the first review of mammalian facial interactions and their neurobiology took place in 2011.

[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095943881...

Have you really seen almost all (kinds of) mammals?

>> While some Westerners are disgusted by insect larvae on a plate, Easterners are similarly revolted by the idea of lifting curdles from soured milk, adding salt, and giving the resulting product a quaint name like “cottage cheese.”

Not quite how cottage cheese is made. Other kinds, much less so.

Easterners also eat cheese, by the way. For example, paneer is a staple of Indian cuisine, various kinds of mostly lactic cheese are made in Mongolia (see recent HN article https://www.cheeseprofessor.com/blog/all-the-cheese-in-china) etc.

The entire article is premised around this assumption:

> Since disgust arrives in middle childhood (ages five to nine), right around the time when social biases are formed,

That has not been my experience with my own kids. Disgust for both tangible (foods) and intangible (fashion/clothing) was certainly evident in children as young as two, and not yet exposed to the world.

In fact, I have vivid memories of our experience with what they apparently call “baby-led weening” and distinctly recall the trademark “disgusted face” when our kid tried certain foods for the first time (at quite a bit younger than one).

> The entire article is premised around this assumption

Not sure "assumption" is the right word here, since this isn't a hot-take by the author :) I just googled "developmental disgust" and skimmed the first few research papers, and 5+ a few years seems to be the consensus of whatever the scientific evaluation processes are.

Our own kids might not be a representative sample, since they're always biased toward our own genetics, and you may be developmentally atypical. Or there may be some caveats in the methodology that are controlled for in studies, but which we might misinterpret when measuring disgust in the wild (maybe "disgust" measurement protocols controls for a "new sensation aversion" or "parental mirroring" that babies have -- literally just made that up, and no idea if those are real things, but an experiment would likely surface and control for any subtleties that the field is aware of :) )

Anyhow, you got my brain thinking back to how it used to work through building scientific protocols, so thanks for the opportunity to exercise that part of my brain again (this was def not my field of study, so I have no special cred here!)

Readers of this would likely find some of Jonathan Haidt's (viz. "Positive Psychology") research on disgust and elevation--as extremes of the same emotional continuum and potentially linking moral emotional reactions to evolutionary mechanisms around food selection and aversion.

Edit: I now note that seneca made the same point before I did, in particular citing "The Righteous Mind" as a good source on this.

I've never experienced this "disgust" for anything in life.

Is it possible in some people it's absent?

Have you ever, say, had to clean a dog who's rolled in feces on a hot day? Or cleaned up after a toddler who's vomited a cheeseburger they ate hours before?

If so, and you didn't experience anything you'd call disgust, I'd say it's possible the answer is yes.

Do you ever accidentally eat rotting meat or sour milk because their smells don't illicit disgust?

that was good

i feel confident that some significant part of the US population revels in disgust

and it's interesting to know that there may be an attraction to it

(and that i may have it, at least when it comes to moral disgust)

creepy

TFA uses the terms "disgust" and "moral repugnance", without defining them, as if we all know and agree what they are, then "discusses" their historical cultural aetiological development without evidence.

This is story telling.

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> This is story telling.

I get so disappointed that this is such a common mic drop pejorative on HN. Of COURSE it's story-telling. That's the point of science communication. Stories penetrate and bridge silos. Data wrapped in narrative happens to be the most effective way to penetrate that vast majority of human neurotypes

Also, I find your requirement for an upfront definition of disgust (and your discount of the content for it not being present) to feel very much like trolling.

EDIT: fwiw, this description of disgust is very much like the story of laughter: how it was repurposed over evolutionary history as we become more social creatures (converting something reflexive into something under social control), and we still see relics of this "migration" in our psychology and musculature (re: duchenne's laughter). So this tracing of the history of disgust is very par for the course in how professionals who study such things talk about this stuff. Your comment is frankly ignorant and dismissive for no good reason.

How is it possible that you don't know what disgust is?

lmfao...loose, nebulous terminology being applied to a mysterious aspect human experience we know next to nothing about. Why waste the effort?

This article contains no science, feel free to ignore.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com