Psychologists said it ’s disgusting to be reminded that you are an animal. It seems they were wrong

By Christian Jarrett Disgust has become a hot topic in psychology research over the last decade or so, not least because findings have shown that the way we respond to physically disgusting threats, like disease-infested blood and puss, is closely related to the way we think about moral violations and moral concepts like purity (hence people’s reluctance to don a shirt purportedly worn by Adolf Hitler). One repeated claim in this area is that we have evolved to be disgusted by any reminder that we are animals. For instance, the leading disgust and morality researchers Jonathan Haidt, Paul Rozin and Clark McCauley have stated that disgust is “a defensive emotion that guards against the recognition of our animality” and that “anything that reminds us that we are animals elicits disgust”. It’s a compelling idea that feeds into other areas of psychology, for example related to how we react to and cope with reminders of our mortality, and the way we often instinctively dehumanise criminals, pariahs and outsiders. The trouble is, nobody has actually put the claim to a robust test. Until now.  Across several surveys, Dolichan Kollareth and James Russell at Boston College tested the emotional reaction of hundreds of people from North America, and Northern and Southern India to various reminders of their animal nature. Their consistent finding, published in Cognition and Emotion, was that people found unpleasant animal reminders disgusting (for ...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Emotion evolutionary psych Morality Source Type: blogs