Jesse Bering

When I first moved to the United Kingdom a few years ago and began house-hunting, I realized that the typical décor inside homes here is slightly different from what you would expect to find in the average American household. Based on the overabundance of shag carpets generously speckled with flicks of vomit-colored hues, the redundant stylistic motifs of concentric circles and the cloying use of linoleum flooring, it would appear the seventies never really left this part of the world. My partner and I found ourselves on more than one occasion turning to each other upon entering one of these homes and whispering with slightly curled upper lips, “disgusting.”

Now this isn’t the place to discuss British aesthetics and I imagine many Europeans would find certain American decorative styles equally vulgar or at least pretentious, but I would like to turn your attention to our use of the word “disgusting” in this context. One of the more interesting sideline debates in psychological science today concerns whether the core emotion of disgust, which involves an aversion to physical contaminants such as bodily waste products, has extended emotionally into other non-contagion domains. For example, my partner, Juan, uses the expression “that’s disgusting” rather frequently—he uses it to describe hairstyles he dislikes, clothes he abhors and architecture he finds offensive. And many people use similar expressions to describe other people or behaviors that violate some social norm.

Quick—what’s the first word that comes to your mind when you conjure up a child molester? If it’s not “disgusting,” it’s probably something similar like “vile,” “repulsive,” “gross” or “nasty.”  Some scholars, such as psychologist Paul Bloom from Yale University, believe that our use of these terms in such non-contaminative contexts is only metaphorical for our anger or dislike. That is to say, Bloom and others reason that we don’t really feel nauseated when we use such words in the social domain—not like we do when we come into contact with someone else’s feces or, in my case, when I nearly step on vomit courtesy of a Queen’s undergraduate student who’d imbibed too much Guinness the evening prior. Rather, Bloom believes that these affectively charged terms invoke the element of disgust in the social domain because they transmit our feelings about things we strongly dislike.

One researcher who believes this type of language goes beyond mere metaphor is Bruce Hood, a psychologist at the University of Bristol. In his soon-to-be-released book SuperSense, Hood argues that human beings are prone to reasoning as though other people have a hidden essence that can be transmitted through physical contact

And in a recent issue of the journal Emotion, psychologists Andrew Jones and Julie Fitness from Macquarie University provide some of the first evidence that, at least when it comes to our thinking about social deviants such as sex offenders, thieves and other criminals, we genuinely feel as though these transgressors are a potential source of physical contamination. In fact, this new work on moral disgust builds on a body of theoretical ideas and other research findings suggesting that human beings reason as though social deviants have the equivalent of cooties. The first scholarly statement I’m aware of that mentions this phenomenon was made by the famous sociologist Erving Goffman in his 1963 book Stigma, in which he noted that people wanted on criminal warrants were once referred to as “having smallpox” and their criminal disease was said to be catching; merely being seen with them could lead to arrest on suspicion.