The strange politics of disgust | David Pizarro

113,902 views ・ 2012-10-23

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Translator: Joseph Geni Reviewer: Morton Bast
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In the 17th century, a woman named Giulia Tofana
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had a very successful perfume business.
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For over 50 years she ran it.
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It sort of ended abruptly when she was executed — (Laughter) —
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for murdering 600 men. You see, it wasn't a very good perfume.
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In fact, it was completely odorless and tasteless and colorless,
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but as a poison, it was the best money could buy,
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so women flocked to her in order to murder their husbands.
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It turns out that poisoners were a valued and feared group,
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because poisoning a human being is a quite difficult thing.
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The reason is, we have sort of a built-in poison detector.
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You can see this as early as even in newborn infants.
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If you are willing to do this, you can take a couple of drops
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of a bitter substance or a sour substance,
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and you'll see that face, the tongue stick out, the wrinkled nose,
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as if they're trying to get rid of what's in their mouth.
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This reaction expands into adulthood and becomes
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sort of a full-blown disgust response, no longer just
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about whether or not we're about to be poisoned,
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but whenever there's a threat of physical contamination
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from some source. But the face remains strikingly similar.
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It has expanded more, though, than just keeping us away
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from physical contaminants, and there's a growing
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body of evidence to suggest that, in fact, this emotion
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of disgust now influences our moral beliefs
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and even our deeply held political intuitions.
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Why this might be the case?
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We can understand this process by understanding
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a little bit about emotions in general. So the basic human emotions,
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those kinds of emotions that we share with all other human beings,
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exist because they motivate us to do good things
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and they keep us away from doing bad things.
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So by and large, they are good for our survival.
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Take the emotion of fear, for instance. It keeps us away
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from doing things that are really, really risky.
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This photo taken just before his death — (Laughter) —
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is actually a — No, one reason this photo is interesting
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is because most people would not do this, and if they did,
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they would not live to tell it, because fear would have
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kicked in a long time ago to a natural predator.
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Just like fear offers us protective benefits, disgust seems
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to do the same thing, except for what disgust does is
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keeps us away from not things that might eat us,
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or heights, but rather things that might poison us,
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or give us disease and make us sick.
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So one of the features of disgust that makes it such
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an interesting emotion is that it's very, very easy to elicit,
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in fact more so than probably any of the other basic emotions,
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and so I'm going to show you that with a couple of images
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I can probably make you feel disgust.
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So turn away. I'll tell you when you can turn back.
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(Laughter)
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I mean, you see it every day, right? I mean, come on. (Laughter)
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(Audience: Ewww.)
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Okay, turn back, if you didn't look.
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Those probably made a lot of you in the audience
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feel very, very disgusted, but if you didn't look,
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I can tell you about some of the other things that have been shown
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sort of across the world to make people disgusted,
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things like feces, urine, blood, rotten flesh.
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These are the sorts of things that it makes sense
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for us to stay away from, because they might actually contaminate us.
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In fact, just having a diseased appearance
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or odd sexual acts, these things are also
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things that give us a lot of disgust.
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Darwin was probably one of the first scientists
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to systematically investigate the human emotions,
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and he pointed to the universal nature and the strength
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of the disgust response.
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This is an anecdote from his travels in South America.
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"In Tierro del Fuego a native touched with his finger
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some cold preserved meat while I was eating ...
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and plainly showed disgust at its softness, whilst I felt
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utter disgust at my food being touched by a naked savage — (Laughter) —
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though his hands did not appear dirty."
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He later wrote, "It's okay, some of my best friends are naked savages." (Laughter)
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Well it turns out it's not only old-timey British scientists
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who are this squeamish. I recently got a chance
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to talk to Richard Dawkins for a documentary,
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and I was able to disgust him a bunch of times. Here's my favorite.
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Richard Dawkins: "We've evolved around courtship and sex,
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are attached to deep-rooted emotions and reactions
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that are hard to jettison overnight."
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David Pizarro: So my favorite part of this clip is that
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Professor Dawkins actually gagged.
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He jumps back, and he gags, and we had to do it three times,
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and all three times he gagged. (Laughter)
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And he was really gagging. I thought he might throw up on me, actually.
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One of the features, though, of disgust,
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is not just its universality and its strength,
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but the way that it works through association.
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So when one disgusting thing touches a clean thing,
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that clean thing becomes disgusting, not the other way around.
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This makes it very useful as a strategy if you want to
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convince somebody that an object or an individual
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or an entire social group is disgusting and should be avoided.
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The philosopher Martha Nussbaum points this out
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in this quote: "Thus throughout history, certain disgust
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properties -- sliminess, bad smell, stickiness, decay, foulness --
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have been repeatedly and monotonously been associated with ...
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Jews, women, homosexuals, untouchables, lower-class people --
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all of those are imagined as tainted by the dirt of the body."
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Let me give you just some examples of how, some powerful
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examples of how this has been used historically.
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This comes from a Nazi children's book published in 1938:
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"Just look at these guys! The louse-infested beards,
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the filthy, protruding ears, those stained, fatty clothes...
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Jews often have an unpleasant sweetish odor.
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If you have a good nose, you can smell the Jews."
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A more modern example comes from people who try to
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convince us that homosexuality is immoral.
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This is from an anti-gay website, where they said
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gays are "worthy of death for their vile ... sex practices."
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They're like "dogs eating their own vomit and sows wallowing in their own feces."
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These are disgust properties that are trying to be directly
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linked to the social group that you should not like.
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When we were first investigating the role of disgust in
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moral judgment, one of the things we became interested in
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was whether or not these sorts of appeals are more likely
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to work in individuals who are more easily disgusted.
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So while disgust, along with the other basic emotions,
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are universal phenomena, it just really is true
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that some people are easier to disgust than others.
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You could probably see it in the audience members
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when I showed you those disgusting images.
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The way that we measured this was by a scale that was
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constructed by some other psychologists
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that simply asked people across a wide variety of situations
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how likely they are to feel disgust.
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So here are a couple of examples.
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"Even if I were hungry, I would not drink a bowl of my
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favorite soup if it had been stirred by a used but thoroughly washed fly-swatter."
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"Do you agree or disagree?" (Laughter)
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"While you are walking through a tunnel under a railroad track,
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you smell urine. Would you be very disgusted or not at all disgusted?"
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If you ask enough of these, you can get a general overall
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score of disgust sensitivity.
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It turns out that this score is actually meaningful.
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When you bring people into the laboratory and you ask
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them if they're willing to engage in safe but disgusting behaviors
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like eating chocolate that's been baked to look like dog poop,
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or in this case eating some mealworms that are perfectly healthy but pretty gross,
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your score on that scale actually predicts whether or not
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you'll be willing to engage in those behaviors.
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The first time that we set out to collect data on this
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and associate it with political or moral beliefs,
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we found a general pattern --
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this is with the psychologists Yoel Inbar and Paul Bloom --
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that in fact, across three studies we kept finding
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that people who reported that they were easily disgusted
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also reported that they were more politically conservative.
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Another way to say this, though, is that people
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who are very liberal are very hard to disgust. (Laughter)
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In a more recent follow-up study, we were able to look at
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a much greater sample, a much larger sample. In this case,
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this is nearly 30,000 U.S. respondents,
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and we find the same pattern. As you can see,
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people who are on the very conservative side
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of answering the political orientation scale are
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also much more likely to report that they're easily disgusted.
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This data set also allowed us to statistically control
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for a number of things that we knew were both related
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to political orientation and to disgust sensitivity.
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So we were able to control for gender, age, income,
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education, even basic personality variables,
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and the result stays the same.
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When we actually looked at not just self-reported political orientation,
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but voting behavior, we were able to look geographically
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across the nation. What we found was that in regions
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in which people reported high levels of disgust sensitivity,
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McCain got more votes.
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So it not only predicted self-reported political orientation,
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but actual voting behavior. And also we were able,
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with this sample, to look across the world,
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in 121 different countries we asked the same questions,
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and as you can see, this is 121 countries collapsed
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into 10 different geographical regions.
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No matter where you look, what this is plotting is the size
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of the relationship between disgust sensitivity and political orientation,
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and no matter where we looked, we saw a very similar effect.
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Other labs have actually looked at this as well
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using different measures of disgust sensitivity,
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so rather than asking people how easily disgusted they are,
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they hook people up to physiological measures,
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in this case skin conductance.
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And what they've demonstrated is that people who report
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being more politically conservative are also more physiologically aroused
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when you show them disgusting images like the ones that I showed you.
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Interestingly, what they also showed in a finding
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that we kept getting in our previous studies as well
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was that one of the strongest influences here is that
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individuals who are very disgust-sensitive not only are
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more likely to report being politically conservative, but
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they're also very much more opposed to gay marriage
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and homosexuality and pretty much a lot of
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the socio-moral issues in the sexual domain.
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So physiological arousal predicted, in this study,
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attitudes toward gay marriage.
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But even with all these data linking disgust sensitivity
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and political orientation, one of the questions that remains is
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what is the causal link here? Is it the case that
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disgust really is shaping political and moral beliefs?
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We have to resort to experimental methods to answer this,
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and so what we can do is actually bring people into the lab
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and disgust them and compare them to a control group
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that hasn't been disgusted. It turns out that over
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the past five years a number of researchers have done this,
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and by and large the results have all been the same,
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that when people are feeling disgust, their attitudes
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shift towards the right of the political spectrum,
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toward more moral conservatism as well.
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So this is whether you use a foul odor, a bad taste,
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from film clips, from post-hypnotic suggestions of disgust,
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images like the ones I've shown you, even just
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reminding people that disease is prevalent and they should
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be wary of it and wash up, right, to keep clean,
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these all have similar effects on judgment.
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Let me just give you an example from a recent study
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that we conducted. We asked participants
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to just simply give us their opinion of a variety of social groups,
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and we either made the room smell gross or not.
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When the room smelled gross, what we saw was that
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individuals actually reported more negative attitudes toward gay men.
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Disgust didn't influence attitudes toward all the other
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social groups that we asked, including African-Americans,
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the elderly. It really came down to the attitudes they had
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toward gay men.
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In another set of studies we actually simply reminded people --
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this was at a time when the swine flu was going around --
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we reminded people that in order to prevent the spread
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of the flu that they ought to wash their hands.
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For some participants, we actually had them take questionnaires
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next to a sign that reminded them to wash their hands.
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And what we found was that just taking a questionnaire
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next to this hand-sanitizing reminder made individuals
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report being more politically conservative.
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And when we asked them a variety of questions about
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the rightness or wrongness of certain acts, what we also
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found was that simply being reminded that they ought
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to wash their hands made them more morally conservative.
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In particular, when we asked them questions about
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sort of taboo but fairly harmless sexual practices,
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just being reminded that they ought to wash their hands
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made them think that they were more morally wrong.
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Let me give you an example of what I mean by harmless
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but taboo sexual practice. We gave them scenarios.
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One of them said a man is house-sitting for his grandmother.
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When his grandmother's away, he has sex with his girlfriend
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on his grandma's bed.
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In another one, we said a woman enjoys masturbating
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with her favorite teddy bear cuddled next to her. (Laughter)
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People find these to be more morally abhorrent
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if they've been reminded to wash their hands. (Laughter)
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(Laughter)
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Okay. The fact that emotions influence our judgment
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should come as no surprise. I mean,
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that's part of how emotions work.
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They not only motivate you to behave in certain ways,
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but they change the way you think.
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In the case of disgust, what is a little bit more surprising
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is the scope of this influence. It makes perfect sense,
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and it's a very good emotion for us to have, that disgust
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would make me change the way that I perceive
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the physical world whenever contamination is possible.
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It makes less sense that an emotion that was built
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to prevent me from ingesting poison should predict
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who I'm going to vote for in the upcoming presidential election.
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The question of whether disgust ought to influence
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our moral and political judgments
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certainly has to be complex, and might depend on exactly
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what judgments we're talking about, and as a scientist,
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we have to conclude sometimes that the scientific method
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is just ill-equipped to answer these sorts of questions.
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But one thing that I am fairly certain about is,
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at the very least, what we can do with this research is
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point to what questions we ought to ask in the first place.
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Thank you. (Applause)
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