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Two people walk into a restaurant. Their first meeting is in 2015, and it is their first date. The man is wearing a jacket in the cold. The woman has glossy white hair. Foie gras is on the menu at a restaurant in the West Village. The man doesn't know that the inside of his jacket has suffered a structural failure and that the filling has massed along the bottom hem, creating a bulge at his waist. The woman looks at the bulge as they greet each other, and asks if her date is wearing a colostomy bag.
The woman is distracted while they sit down to eat. The woman has a bag on her mind as they chat about their lives. Is it or not? The two academics are of an age where such an intervention is not out of the realm of possibility. At the end of their dinner, the man takes the train back to Philadelphia, while the woman goes back to her apartment on the Upper West Side. The date was a success despite the man's mystery.
The question of no colostomy bag was resolved on their third date. Paul Rozin, one of the academics, said he was testing her to see if she would put up with him. He was not testing her. He was not aware of the bulge. Virginia Valian said she was worried.
An imaginary colostomy bag played a starring role in the couple's first encounter. He is a renowned psychologist who taught at the University of Pennsylvania for 52 years, has gathered honors and fellowships, and has published hundreds of influential papers, but he is best known for his work as chairman of the university's department of psychology. In the early 1980s, Rozin noticed that there wasn't a lot of data on this aspect of life. He thought that the last six basic emotions, anger, surprise, fear, enjoyment, sadness, and disgust, had not been studied.
It is everywhere when you are disgusted. On your morning commute, you may see a roadkill on the highway or see a rat on the subway tracks. You look at the person at work who doesn't wash his hands after a trip to the toilet. You change your child's diaper, empty your cat's litter box, throw out the fuzzy leftovers in the fridge at home. You are either a baby or in a coma if you complete a single day without feeling disgust.
Disgust affects our behavior and technology. It is the reason we use the bathroom in private and use forks instead of bare hands. I floss my teeth as an adult because a dentist once told me that brushing my teeth without flossing is like taking a shower without removing shoes. Do they teach that line in dentistry school? 14 words accomplished what a decade of parental nagging hadn't. You can find a lot of disgust-avoidance techniques if you peel most of the guidelines. Rules governing the emotion have existed in every culture. The output of disgust varies from place to place, with a characteristic facial expression that includes a lowered jaw and sometimes an extended tongue, sometimes it's disgusting. The gape face is often accompanied by nausea and a desire to run away or clean oneself, as well as the urge to clean oneself.
The more you read about the history of the emotion, the more convinced you are that disgust is the energy that powers a whole host of seemingly unrelated phenomena. Disgust is a bodily experience that creeps into every corner of our social lives, a piece of evolutionary hardware designed to protect our stomachs that expanded into a system for protecting our souls.
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Maisie was a reporter for The New York Times.
The first modern observer to drop a pebble into a pond of disgust was Darwin. In his book, he describes an encounter he had with Darwin at a campsite in Tierra del Fuego, where he was eating a portion of cold preserved meat. A naked savage poked Darwin's meat with a finger as he ate. Darwin was disgusted at having his snack fingered. Darwin thought the other man was repelled by the unusual texture of the meat, but he wasn't sure about the origins of his own response. The hands of the savage did not look dirty. What about the poking that made Darwin's food inedible? Was the man naked? His foreignness? The sight of soup smeared in a man's beard was disgusting, even though there was nothing disgusting in the soup itself.
The disgust accounts following Darwin come from two Hungarian men, Aurel Kolnai and Andras Angyal. I haven't found any evidence that they knew each other, but it seems unlikely that Angyal didn't draw from his countryman's paper. The Angyal paper does not have a reference to Kolnai. Angyal may have failed to cite his sources. There is a chance that he was unaware of the earlier paper and that he was driven to investigate a subject that no one else took seriously.
A third possibility is that Angyal gave up midway through the paper. The density of osmium is what Kolnai has in his writing. The paper is rife with scare quotes and clauses. The first insights that are accepted in the field were arrived at by Kolnai. Think of the Q-tip you inspect after withdrawing it from a waxy ear canal, or the existence of reality-TV shows about plastic surgery, as examples of how disgusting things can hold a "curious enticement". He pointed out that hearing isn't a strong indicator of disgust and that the senses of smell, taste, sight and touch are the primary entry points. One would not find an equivalent parallel in the aural sphere to the feeling of a bloated body or of a belly ripped open.
The decomposing corpse was the epitome of disgust, because it showed him that disgust was not caused by decay but the process of it. There is a difference between a corpse and a skeleton. Although both present evidence that death has occurred, a corpse is not good. Hamlet wouldn't talk to the rotting head of a jester. The dynamic nature of a decomposing corpse, the fact that it changed color and form, and the presence of life within it all suggest the presence of life within death.
Angyal argued that disgust wasn't strictly sensory. We can experience colors and sounds and tastes as unpleasant, but they can't be disgusting on their own. He told a story about walking through a field and passing a shack with a smell that pierced his nostrils and he took it for a decaying animal. His first reaction was disgust. He realized that he had made a mistake when he smelled glue. He wrote that the odor seemed quite agreeable because of some pleasant associations with carpentry. The glue probably came from dead animals, but the attack had been mitigated by Angyal's shifting mental associations.
Angyal contended that the smell wasn't just a bad smell, it was a fear of being messed with. The stronger the reaction, the closer the contact is. Angyal's study is even more delightful when viewed in the context of its preface, which explains that the material is based on observations and conversations not collected in any formal manner, and that the method lacked objectivity and control. As the crisis in the sciences continues to unfold, Angyal's humility takes on a refreshing flavor. He seems to say that he is just a guy looking at something. Let's see where this leads.
I met Rozin at a restaurant on the Upper West Side. He wore a bucket hat and a navy shirt. We ate rice crepes piled with different vegetable elements at the table. While spearing the Papaya, he noted that this is a form of social bonding, eating from the same bowl. He and a team did a study on it. In the case of Rozin, a research psychologist can usefully explain all sorts of immediate lived phenomena, and in the case of him, he may even have hypothesised the explanations himself. We polished off the jumbo portion of our crepes because they were the width of basketballs, enough to feed six easily. The effect of unit bias was described back in 2006 by Rozin and his co-authors. Humans tend to think that a given unit of an entity is the optimal amount to consume. Movie popcorn and king-size candy bars are dangerous, and possibly one reason French people remain thin.
The Jewish parents of Rozin, who was born in the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn, were pleased to discover that their son was a brainiac, even though they hadn't attended college themselves. He left high school early and got a full scholarship to the University of Chicago after his 16th birthday, after testing into a public school for gifted children. After graduating from Harvard, he took a joint PhD in biology and psychology and a post-doc in public health at the Harvard School of Public Health. After working his way up from an assistant professor to an associate professor, he decided that he wanted to focus on bigger game.
He was interested in the acquisition of reading. There was a problem with kids learning to read in Philadelphia. A large number of children were unable to read by second grade, but they were always able to speak English. They could point to thousands of objects and ask, "Why is this strange man in my classroom?" It would seem like mastering an alphabet of 26 letters would be a piece of cake compared to the vast dictionary of words they have in their brains. It was a crisis. The experimental curriculum that was devised was based on teaching children Chinese logographs followed by a Japanese syllabary, and then applying the same logic to English. The system worked like a dream, but the school response waslukewarm.
He said he was overwhelmed by the bureaucracy. He didn't find anything appealing about the process of pitching and marketing. It would take a long time to sell administrators on the curriculum and train teachers to deliver it. He and a colleague wrote several papers with the findings. He said it was the right way to teach reading. Nothing happened with it. He wondered if other researchers would follow the idea. But he was done. He was thinking about the subject he would become best known for.
He said that Rozin started with meat. He was still a full-spectrum omnivore when he started puzzling over meat. Meat is one of the world's favorite food categories, but it is also one of the most tabooed. The health implications of meat was not something that was on the mind of Rozin. The stuff had been studied. He zeroed in on the negative feelings around meat. People disliked it when they disliked it. A rotten cut of beef evoked a different reaction than a rotten apple. Why? Or rather, what? What was the difference between a Granny Smith and a steak? A bad apple can be distasteful, but befouled meat can cause a sensation cluster ofContamination, Querasiness and Deficiency.
It was the Angyal paper that really got Rozin's brain firing, and on its foundation he began to construct the theory that would go on to inform, every subsequent attempt at defining and understanding disgust over the following decades. In his opinion, the emotion was all about food. Humans have a lot of flexibility in their diet. Koalas eat almost nothing but leaves, but humans must look at a wide range of eating options and figure out what to put in our mouths. The phrase "omnivore's dilemma" is one of the coinages of Rozin. Michael Pollan borrowed it. He argued that disgust evolved as one of the factors that determines what to eat. If a person was too easily disgusted, she would not be able to consume enough calories and would die. It was best to be somewhere in the middle, approaching food with a combination of neophobia and neophilia. It was suggested by Rozin that all forms of disgust grew from our revulsion at the thought of eating worms or feces.
It makes sense to focus on food. We register disgust in the form of nausea and vomiting because it is the body's way of hitting the "undo" button on whatever we just ate. If disgust were a biological phenomenon, it would look the same across all cultures. It doesn't explain why we are disgusted by topics like bestiality or incest, the smell of a stinky armpit, or the idea of being submerged in a pit of roaches. None of these have anything to do with food. The next project was to figure out what the disgust elicitors were. What could they have in common that caused a unified response?
Maisie was a reporter for The New York Times.
In 1986, a landmark paper was published by Rozin and two colleagues, which argued that the emotion was more complicated than Darwin or the Hungarians had thought. The paper was based on a few simple experiments. A participant was invited to sit at a table in a lab room. The experimenter put the disposable cups in front of the subject while seated next to the participant. The experimenter poured some juice into the two cups after opening a new carton. The participant was asked to drink from cups. So far, so good. The experimenter put a dead roaches in a plastic cup. The experimenter told the participant that he was going to take the dead insect and put it in a juice glass. The roach was dropped into a cup of juice and removed with a tool. The experimenter dipped the piece of plastic into the other cup as a control. The participants were asked which cup they preferred. Almost nobody wanted the "roached" juice. A brief moment of contact with an object had ruined it.
Participants were asked to eat a square of fudge presented on a paper plate. There were two more pieces of the fudge that were shaped like dog feces. The subjects were told to bite their preferred piece. The aversive stimuli are referred to as "nasty stuff" by psychologists. When asked about the outliers who chose the nasty stuff, Rozin waved a hand and said, "There's always a macho person."
The results might seem obvious, but the experiments were designed to elicit a disgust response rather than the typical food-rejection responses like distaste. Disgust was different from the other three responses in that it could be motivated by what a person knew or thought about the object at hand.
Until this point, psychologists used the term sympathetic magic to describe magical belief systems in traditional cultures. Sympathetic magic has a few iron laws. One of the laws is the law of contact. The roach juice showed this law; if you kept the juice in the freezer for a year, participants wouldn't drink it. The law of similarity is that things are similar. Reality and appearance are related. The fudge would be dog-doo.
They went on to invent other scenarios to test their theories. If apple juice was served in a bedpan, would people drink it? Would they drink a favorite soup if it had been stirred by a fly swatter? Would they use a new one on their lips? Would they wear a Nazi hat with a swastika on it?
The 1986 paper was the equivalent of a sculptor cutting down a statue from a block of marble, and the papers that were published after were the chisel-maneuvering that revealed a detailed anatomy underneath. He found that some of our disgust responses might be designed to avoid diseases. A person who tries to avoid the blast of a sick person's sneeze is more likely to survive and produce offspring who will themselves avoid sneeze radii.
The "animal reminder" theory states that disgust is a way to ignore the mountain of evidence that humans are just like every other mammal. Dogs play with their own feces, as required by our hygiene laws. Our sexual laws require that we refrain from having sex with our siblings, like cats, or copulating with the dead, like certain snakes, or cannibalizing our children, like rabbits. Adhering to purity rules will help to make us aware that our bodily temple is not a meat suit. One of the most intriguing theories is that disgust is a sign of our own deaths. We will all become moldy meat ourselves at some point, and every encounter with it is a glimpse of that.
Maisie was a reporter for The New York Times.
It's ripe for comedy because of the reality-puncturing and social elements of disgust. This monologue was from a 1995 episode of "Seinfeld".
The weird thing about hair is that people will touch other people's hair. You will kiss another person on the head. It is now the most disgusting thing that you can encounter, if one of those hairs can get out of that skull. The hair is the same. People are freaked out. There was a hair in the salad.
Whether it be our own or someone else, the point about rogue hairs is always gross. When attached to the body or housed within it, snot, spit, pee becomes a pollutant only when it breaks free from its container.
The disgust scale was developed by Rozin and two co-authors in 1994. He was suggesting seven areas of disgust by this time: food, animals, body products, sexual deviance, poor hygiene and contact with death. The first part of the test consisted of false statements such as "I might be willing to try eating monkey meat, under some circumstances" and "It would not upset me at all to watch a person with a glass eye take the eye out of the sockets." The second portion asked a person to rate how disgusting certain experiences are, such as, "You discover that a friend of yours changes underwear only once a week" or "You step on an earthworm."
The average score was 17. In our interactions, this was true. At dinner one night, Rozin pulled out his phone and shared photos of a meal that one of his sons had prepared: crickets in chili sauce, mealworms, and deep- fried tarantulas. There was a plate of imitation turds. One of the cakes was coiled. It was a lot of fun.
The topic of funerals came up later that night. After his own death, he hadn't yet decided what to do with himself. He said that most cannibals ate their ancestors. They ate them after they died. He thought the underlying concept of ritual cannibalism had a certain beauty, despite the fact that it held little appeal to the average person. He said that when his ex-wife died, she was cremated and we were burying her ashes under a tree. I felt like I had to eat some.
Why? I asked as he buttered a piece of bread.
As though it were obvious, Rozin replied, "To integrate some of the person I loved very much." By the way, this is good bread.
Over the past two centuries, people have been saying that their period is the most disgusting period that has ever existed. This can't be true. It is unthinkable that any era since the advent of modern Sanitation could be more disgusting than the previous one. It is now easy to buy vomit-flavored Jelly beans at Walmart and watch internet videos of people being beheaded. These are not regular activities. The scenarios of caring for the sick are now more likely to occur in institutions. Garbage is sealed in bags. Our waste is whisked down an invisible network of pipes to tanks and treatment facilities.
The scholar William Ian Miller wrote in 1997 that part of disgust is the awareness of being disgusted. Disgust can be thought of as intrusive and unriddable thoughts about the repugnance of that which is its object. You cannot be disgusted without knowing that you are. There is no evidence that nonhuman animals experience disgust. Yes, it was distasteful. Yes, it was like that. Miller said that the capacity to be disgusted is human and humanizing. Those with ultrahigh thresholds are those who we think of as belonging to a different category: Protohuman like children, subhuman like the mad or suprahuman like saints. The saint Catherine of Siena is known for drinking the pus of a woman's open sore.
Sianne Ngai wrote about disgust as a social feeling. A person in the thick of it will want her experience confirmed by other people. This cheese smells terrible. Here, smell it. Conservatives show a far higher disgust response than liberals, which is an accurate predictor of political orientation. In a study done in 2014, participants were shown a range of images and their brain responses were monitored. Researchers were able to predict a person's political orientation based on analysis of this data.
Jonathan Haidt, the social psychologist and co-author of "The Coddling of the American Mind," is a student of Rozin. Haidt told me that he came to see him because he was studying moral psychology. When I started reading ethnographies, I saw that almost all of them had purity and pollution standards. There are tons of rules about menstruation, corpses, sexual taboos, and food. Western societies were the exception in their lower regulation of disgust-related activities. There were plenty of groups in America that legislated bodily practices related to disgust, like Orthodox Jews and Catholics. Western secular progressives were the only ones that disgust remained lawless.
Maisie was a reporter for The New York Times.
Haidt noticed that Americans used the word "disgusting" to describe things such as racism, brutality, hypocrisy and ambulance-chasing lawyers. Conservatives are said to be disgusting by liberals. In 1997 he wrote a paper with two other people. What was that about? Was the use of disgust for such a wide range of activities just a metaphor? Did the pundits who sat around all day express their disgust on TV by keeping a vomiting bucket next to their desks, or were they just being linguistically imprecise?
Neither, exactly. When Haidt and Rozin looked at other languages, they found that many of the words had the same meaning as "disgust" and could be used to refer to legislation and diarrhea. The German had akel. Japanese had a drink called ken'o. Bengali had a loud voice. The Hebrew word for go-al is go-al. A woman from Israel was asked what situations made her feel good, and she mentioned a horrible accident and a person who ate their nose. She said that if you dislike a politician, you would use the word go-al.
If the initial function of disgust was like a piece of caution tape over our mouths, the tape wound itself around our other holes to regulate sexual activity and moral activity. A single anecdote can taint an entire presidential campaign. You may remember a story in the year 2019: Senator Amy Klobuchar ate a salad with a comb. The aide bought a salad for the senator at the airport. When the senator wanted to eat her salad on the plane, there were no utensils available. After berating the aide, she retrieved a comb from her purse and ate her salad with it. She gave the comb to her aide, who was supposed to clean it.
The comb story was part of a larger narrative about the senator's treatment of her staff, which she tried to spin into evidence of her exactitude. The senator's defense was useless, but you have to admire the effort. Nobody thought that her mistake was having high expectations. She made a mistake in front of many people. The image was unforgettable. You couldn't read the story without imagining the comb, a hair still caught in its teeth, plunging into an oily airport salad. It had a negative effect. The anecdote was in you, the voter. You had no choice but to resent the person who put the comb there because of the taste.
The pubic hair on the Coke can is one of the disgust-related political scandals. On a recent weekend, I passed a truck in Queens with a bumper sticker that said, "Any Burning or Disrespecting of the American flag and the driver of this truck will get out and knock you out." This was a perfect litmus test. A liberal might walk past a truck and think that the guy has an anger problem. A conservative might walk past a truck and think that the guy in it is really fond of our country. There are people who think a flag is a piece of cloth, but for most people, a flag is not a piece of cloth. It has a special meaning. If a person sees the American flag as a piece of fabric, it is not likely to be disgusted. It is impossible to not feel that the flag is a sacred symbol.
There are two types of human, one which is liberal and the other which is conservative. It is important to remember that disgust sensitivity is more about our feelings about purity and pollution than politics. These contribute to the construction of moral systems and guide our political orientations.
To ward off disgust, we wash the dirt from our lettuce or cancel the appointment of a semipublic figure who posted a racist message. We watch the borders of mouth, body and nation. Hitler described Jews as a rotting corpse and a noxious bacillus. One reason long skirts were a dominant fashion in Western Europe for centuries was to hide the bottom half of the body and the sexual organs, according to the fashion historian Anne Hollander. Hollander argues that the expression of a horrified disgust at the lower female anatomy is what distinguishes a mermaid from a folkloric figure.
It is possible to wash your hands orbaptism in purification rites. We will never separate ourselves from the instinct to purify, even as we name different reasons for doing so: justice, patriotism, progress, tradition, freedom, public health, God, science. Beneath it all will be a confused omnivore who stumbles upon a mushroom in the forest with no idea what will happen if she eats it.
benign masochism is one of the greatest coinages of Rozin, it describes any experience that is unpleasant but enjoyable. The category includes horror movies, roller coasters, deep tissue massage, bungee jumping, hot chili peppers, frigid showers and tragic novels. I can think of more edge cases, like John Waters' films. Many people like to look at their own [expletive] after they make it in the toilet. There is a fascination. The humor is all there. It is probably related to benign masochism.
The idea is that these experiences cause fear or pain or repulsion without posing a real threat. Our ability to survive safe menaces gives us a sense of mastery. It is a meta-experience, when you experience yourself with a ghost pepper or a movie, you get to enjoy yourself, and you can forge a gap between what should feel bad but feels fun.
benign masochism is a uniquely human experience. There is no evidence that animals indulge in it. It took me several days to comprehend the paper written by the team and it was an example of the subject at hand: an immense irritant with only abstract and hard-won rewards. Academic papers make you cry, chili peppers make you sweat, and tragic novels make you cry, and then give you a splendid phrase to use for the rest of your life.
The F.D.A.'s " Food Defect Levels Handbook" is a good place to start if you want to learn more about food defects. It shows the amount of disgusting matter in a given food that will prompt enforcement action, meaning that any less is fine. The site will tell you that peanut butter can only contain 30 insect fragments and one hair per 100 grams. A can of mushrooms may hold less than 20 flies. A quarter of the olives in a package may be bad. A clever entrepreneurial could alert people to the dry rot and beetle eggs that adulterate their favorite foods and establish a weight-loss program. Who wants to live that way? Deny is the best bulwark against disgust, the only bulwark against so much of life.
Molly Young is a book critic for The New York Times.
