What is Disgust?
Getting to know the theories of Paul Rozin, a Scholar of Disgust
Mr. Yuck illustration by Corey Lunn
Published in YA5 in Summer 2011
My dad took my brother and me to a HoneyBaked Ham shop. I took a bite of ham sandwich, and then my dad leaned in, looked at my mouth, and told me that my teeth were filled with eyelashes.[1]
You may be making a face right now that Darwin termed the “disgust gape.” Your nose will wrinkle. The corners of your mouth will droop. You may stick out your tongue, as though beginning to vomit, or suck your bottom lip up and in, as if to say, ‘Don’t put that in my mouth!’
The disgust gape differs slightly from culture to culture, but universally, people express disgust with contortions of the mouth and nose. Many things can trigger this expression, not only immediate ones that you don’t want to ingest. I gape every time I hear news about the Catholic Church covering up pedophile priests. I gaped continuously while watching the movie The Human Centipede.[2] Disgust is an emotion that straps our stomachs to our moral sensibility. Our bodies are often reacting to an idea, and the strength of our repulsion is tied to the power of our imagination. (What if my sandwich were filled with eyelashes!)
My day job has me thinking a lot about disgust. I work for a food magazine published by a nonprofit. We strain our minds everyday trying to think of new ways to make seasonal ingredients seem tantalizing to entice readers to cook from scratch, shop at farmers’ markets, and generally put more money in the pockets of conscientious nearby food producers. Sometimes, while I’m searching for words to describe, for example, a radish (“those luscious, ruby gems”), I feel like a whoopee cushion squeezing out air.
But I know why we use these tactics. We’re trying to win over people’s stomachs and minds in the battle against corporate profit, obesity, and other food-related chronic health problems. Our sometimes specific, often amorphous opponents are astonishingly successful at manipulating the push and pull of our disgust and desire receptors. Nearly every tv food commercial includes a cumshot of sizzling, oozing grease/nacho cheese/low-fat pudding. I often become dumbstruck, wondering: Why are some foods disgusting to us and others not? Why are some disgusting things simultaneously repulsive and alluring? How much of our disgust sensitivity is hard-wired and how much is culturally learned? What am I really working toward or against, and what’s the best approach?
My curiosity led me to the father of modern disgust research, Paul Rozin. He coined the term the “omnivore’s dilemma,” made famous by Michael Pollan, who borrowed it for his eponymous bestselling book, in which he poses Rozin’s question: In a world where an omnivore could potentially eat anything, how do we choose what goes in our mouths?
When Rozin, who has been a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania since 1963, began studying disgust 48 years ago, very few psychologists had touched the subject of perceptions and reactions to food. His research has given form to the field, reviewing and consolidating previous theories (including Darwin’s), and creating a framework to talk about how cultures and individuals negotiate and adapt the emotion of disgust. What I find most enjoyable about Rozin’s writing and theories are the studies he has conducted that inform them. He seems to have the imagination of a world-class fiction writer and has found an audience, in his undergraduates, to perform the hairiest and most peculiar experiments. Here are a few of his basic premises and studies to give you an introduction to the field of disgust research.
Core Disgust, or, Survival by Aversion
Rozin believes that the emotion of disgust initially appeared in humans as a way to protect themselves from toxins and infective agents. Many foods can pose danger to us without revealing that they’ve spoiled or are poisonous – for example, meat left unrefrigerated. For self-preservation, we learned to feel repulsion toward potentially harmful things; most potent among them are those that have or are decaying. Rozin terms this protection of the mouth and body from direct contamination “core disgust.”
Preadaptation
If disgust originated as an oral defense, today, its elicitors are far more diverse, although our responses—psychological repulsion and physiological gaping, gagging, and nausea—have remained the same. Rozin has narrowed human disgust to nine domains: “food, body products, animals, sexual behaviors, contact with death or corpses, violations of the exterior envelope of the body (including gore and deformity), poor hygiene, interpersonal contamination (contact with unsavory human beings), and certain moral offenses.” By body products, he does not mean products applied to the body, like scented lotion, but products removed from the body, such as saliva, hair, nail clippings, and feces.
How did all of these disparate things, including the abstract and conceptual, come to arouse in people the self-same disgust gape? Rozin attributes it to a process called preadaptation, in which a basic human function is utilized, alone or in combination with other functions, for another purpose. His example is speech. Our tongue and teeth developed to allow us to consume food, but we learned to use them in coordination with our respiratory system to vocalize sound and thus create oral language. Preadaptation is adaptive opportunism. In this case, we had a system for learning rejection, and as culture progressed, it was summoned as a powerful form of negative socialization. Our feelings of disgust help us negotiate social significance, intimacy, group identity, moral order, and more.
Feces
Rozin is careful to differentiate between disgust and distaste. Distaste is rejection of something with offensive sensory properties. Children show an innate distaste for bitter and often sour flavors. But not all disgusting things have to have an odious odor or flavor. The motivation for disgust, Rozin says, is what you believe or have witnessed about the object at hand. He uses as an example the question: Which of the following glasses of water would you drink: one that contains an odorless, harmless, incredibly bitter liquid; one laced with a lethal dose of arsenic; or one that is sterile and contains pure water but previously held a sample of dog feces. Aversion to the first is an example of distaste and to the last of disgust.
One of the most stomach-turning things I’ve witnessed is the online video “2 girls 1 cup.” (Spoiler alert! In the video, two girls defecate into a cup, eat from it, make out, and then vomit into each other’s mouths.) While the video is host to a slurry of potential disgust triggers that may or may not bother/titillate a viewer, including eating with your hands, pornography, and vomit, many studies have shown that feces is universally nauseating among adults.
In 1983, Rozin and several colleagues performed a study to measure children’s responses to “disgusting” substances. Previous research had shown that neither children nor nonhuman animals display repulsion toward poop. Many infants are actually attracted to it; the smell doesn’t bother them, and children will often put feces in their mouths. In this study, Rozin et. al. asked kids their feelings about a glass of milk if dog feces were dipped in it. They also presented them with a cookie, comb, and glass of juice when an insect or human hair was touched to or placed inside each. On average, North American children were not repulsed by any of the above until age seven. Rozin theorizes that through potty training and example, we teach children to feel disgust toward feces as a form of socialization and a defense against disease. Writ large, he argues that children develop their acquired sense of disgust through cultural influence.
Sympathetic Magic
The 1983 experiment also shows another development that occurs between infancy and adolescence: a disgust response toward contamination. Adults often feel that once something is touched by a disgusting substance, it becomes disgusting. Rozin shrinks it down to the phrase, “Once in contact, always in contact.” For example, people respond with repulsion toward a sandwich offered by someone they consider unsavory, apple juice served in a clean bedpan, or a piece of fruit with a worm hole. Children do not make the underlying associative leaps.
Another term for this is sympathetic magical thinking. Sympathetic magic essentially describes voodoo, or the belief that magic can imbue the life of one thing into its effigy. Sympathetic magical thinking is when we believe the substance of one thing permeates or taints another. Rozin notes that this fear of contagion can be crippling, even when our adult responses are irrational. Everything around us is potentially contaminated—think of the unknown people who cook our food in restaurant kitchens or the particles of poop in the air—but we usually push these thoughts out of our minds unless the source of disgust is prominent. For example, when the man in the food cart blows his nose before cooking your burger or you can really smell poop in the air.
32-Point Disgust Scale
The apple juice in a bedpan example of sympathetic magical thinking comes from a two-part study performed in 1993 with 250 University of Pennsylvania undergraduates. In Part I, Rozin administered a test he and colleagues had created known as the “32-Point Disgust Scale” or “D-Scale.” Each “point” is a question. The first 16 were true or false questions, including:
· I might be willing to try eating monkey meat, under some circumstances.
· It bothers me to see someone in a restaurant eating messy food with his fingers.
· It would bother me tremendously to touch a dead body.
The second 16 questions asked testers to answer on a scale from 0, “not disgusting at all,” to 2, “highly disgusting”:
· Your friend’s pet cat dies, and you have to pick up the dead body with your bare hands.
· You see someone put ketchup on vanilla ice cream, and eat it.
· You discover that a friend of yours changes underwear only once a week.
The questions each focused on one of three sub-categories of disgust that Rozin and company have articulated: core disgust, contamination disgust, and “animal reminder disgust.” That third group includes anything involving “death, corpses, and violations of the external boundaries of the body, such as amputations.” Here, Rozin brings into focus a major pinnacle of his theories: that disgust arises toward things that remind us that we are animals. He argues that time and again disgust serves to differentiate what is human and civilized from what is animal. We bring food to our mouths, not our mouths to food. We wipe our asses. When people don’t do those things, we think they’re disgusting.
Rozin postulates that the greatest reminder of our animal vulnerability is our mortality, and as a result, death and its associations are among the most powerful disgust elicitors. There is something in this premise that I struggle to grasp. My gut tells me that, more simply, the reason objects in decay are disgusting is because they are prime disease hosts, and disfigurement and mutilation are repulsive because we’re exposing our bodies to potential bacterial and otherwise destructive intruders. Death itself creates the ultimate “body product”: a dead body.
Whatever the reason for our repulsion, Rozin incisively points out that disgust “protects” us in two seemingly counteractive ways: (1) It points out what to avoid for self-preservation, and (2) it helps to push those very things out of our thoughts. Disgust disarms our ability to think through situations and simply impels us to reject them.
You can test your own disgust sensitivity using a current version of the D-Scale, narrowed to 27 questions. Visit www.yourmorals.org and scroll your way down to the “Disgust Scale.” You’ll be able to see your own results, which will also be sent to two long term collaborators of Rozin who teach at the University of Virginia. (Perhaps the best reason to take it is simply to see what these researchers deem a valuable question.) How did I score? Overall, compared to the 49,852 people who took the study before me, the test scores me as slightly less sensitive to contamination disgust, about on par with core disgust, and almost twice as sensitive to animal reminder disgust.
Eating Human Ashes
Several months after first administering the D-Scale in 1993, Rozin and colleagues followed up with 68 students from the original group for Part II: a 32-point test that measured participants’ willingness to perform “disgusting” actions as told. The idea of the entire study was to line up the results of both components and look for correlations between disgust feelings and actions.
The students were scheduled one at a time. The first instruction, intended as a warm-up, was to eat a corn chip the student was handed with a pair of tongs. Ten students refused, to Rozin’s surprise, which let the researchers know that corn chips are a strong disgust trigger! Subsequent requests included touching a cockroach to their lips (10% willing), drinking apple juice that was stirred with a brand new comb (77%), drinking apple juice from a bedpan (27%), putting on a Nazi officer’s swastika emblazoned armband (44%), licking simulated green mucus from the nostrils of a toy head (6%), and touching, holding and eating human ashes (37%, 31% and 1%, respectively.) The ashes were not actually human, but animal bone meal, and the only participant who ate them also performed everything on the disgust list except for one, which was intended simply to measure general compliance. This 17-year-old male refused the request to “stand up and flap your arms like wings and cluck like a chicken” (54%).
What did Rozin and colleagues discover with their House of Horrors carnival-esque study? The D-Scale can significant predict actual behavior. In other words, people who are very sensitive to core disgust elicitors tend to be unwilling to handle core disgust objects, and mutatis mutandis. Broken down even more, if people feel disgust strongly, it influences what they are and are not willing to look at, touch, and do.
Rozin and associates concluded their summary with the delighted assertion that unlike other negative emotions, including shame, sadness, embarrassment, and fear, disgust “can be elicited in the laboratory in strong but ecologically valid ways and yet remain… ethically viable (according to both our participants and our institutional board.)” This spelled further research and many apple juice and Nazi paraphernalia studies to follow.
Moral Disgust
Beyond my sheer amazement at Paul Rozin, what I find most interesting, and disturbing, in this whole slop bucket is the socio-moral layers we’ve piled on. Our personal feelings of disgust wield incredible influence over our world views and choices. They are a powerful sword and shield. Disgust knights us. It simultaneously isolates us from some things (and people) and unites us to others. It is an archaic, ancestral response-system that does its best to protect us from food-borne diseases, but more often in this day and age acts to belittle, demean and ostracize that on which it focuses its gaze.
I noticed while taking the current online D-Scale test that some of the questions from Rozin’s original had been removed in the nearly twenty year span since it was first written, including: True/False: I think homosexual activities are immoral. There is real irony in the parity between my feelings of disgust toward homophobes, and homophobes’ feelings of disgust toward homosexuals. We are both haters, whose faces reveal us when we wrinkle our noses and contort our mouths.
In my field of work, we are routinely facing a complicated, morally shaky situation. We want to fight against food choices that pose a danger to our health, but our demands and accusations end up adding fuel to the fire that has made obesity an object of disgust. Somehow, the conversation about fat has become moralized. How can we talk about dangerous foods without degrading and demeaning people when they eat them? Should we try to activate people’s disgust triggers towards foods that cause health problems? That seems to be a very treacherous, one-way road. Fat has been successfully demonized to the seeming detriment of our collective health. In this day and age, when moral disgust and core disgust are so tightly knotted, we face the serious challenge of acknowledging when our disgust is actually distorted bigotry.
Works Referenced
Darwin, The expression of emotions in man and animals, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1965 (original work published in 1872.)
Rozin, “Food and Eating,” Kitayama and Cohen (Ed.), Handbook of Cultural Psychology, Guilford Press, 2007, pages 391-416.
Rozin, Fallon, and Augustoni-Ziskind, “The child’s conception of food: The development of contamination sensitivity to “disgusting” substances,” Developmental Psychology, 21, 1985, pages 1075-1079.
Rozin, Fallon, and Augustoni-Ziskind, “The child’s conception of food: The development of contamination categories of accepted and rejected substances,” Journal of Nutrition Education, 18, 1985, pages 75-81.
Rozin, Fishcler, Imada, Sarubin, and Wrzesniewski, “Attitudes to food and the role of food in life: Comparisons of Flemish Belgium, France, Japan and the United States,” Appetite, 33, 1999, pages 163-180.
Rozin, Haidt and McCauley, “Disgust,” Lewis and Haviland (Ed.), Handbook of Emotions, second edition, New York: Guilford Press, 2000, pages 575-594.
Rozin, Haidt, McCauley, Dunlop, and Ashmore, “Individual Differences in Disgust Sensitivity: Comparisons and Evaluations of Paper-and-Pencil versus Behavioral Measures,” Journal of Research in Personality, 33, 1999, pages 330-351.
[1] HoneyBaked is one word. This experience happened to my dear friend Rachael Wilson.
[2] A film from 2009 directed by Tom Six in which a mad German scientist sews three people together, mouth to asshole, mouth to asshole.
