The yuck factor: The surprising power of disgust

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From politics to commerce to sex, the "forgotten emotion" of disgust can affect you in subtle ways

Take the test: "How easily disgusted are you?"

DAVID PIZARRO can change the way you think, and all he needs is a small vial of liquid. You simply have to smell it. The psychologist spent many weeks tracking down the perfect aroma. It had to be just right. "Not too powerful," he explains. "And it had to smell of real farts."

It's no joke. Pizarro needed a suitable fart spray for an experiment to investigate whether a whiff of something disgusting can influence people's judgements.

His experiment, together with a growing body of research, has revealed the profound power of disgust, showing that this emotion is a much more potent trigger for our behaviour and choices than we ever thought. The results play out in all sorts of unexpected areas, such as politics, the judicial system and our spending habits. The triggers also affect some people far more than others, and often without their knowledge. Disgust, once dubbed "the forgotten emotion of psychiatry", is showing its true colours.

Disgust is experienced by all humans, typically accompanied by a puckered-lipped facial expression. It is well established that it evolved to protect us from illness and death. "Before we had developed any theory of disease, disgust prevented us from contagion," says Pizarro, based at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. The sense of revulsion makes us shy away from biologically harmful things like vomit, faeces, rotting meat and, to a certain extent, insects.

Disgust's remit broadened when we became a supersocial species. After all, other humans are all potential disease-carriers, says Valerie Curtis, director of the Hygiene Centre at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. "We've got to be very careful about our contact with others; we've got to mitigate those disease-transfer risks," she says. Disgust is the mechanism for doing this - causing us to shun people who violate the social conventions linked to disgust, or those we think, rightly or wrongly, are carriers of disease. As such, disgust is probably an essential characteristic for thriving on a cooperative, crowded planet.

Yet the idea that disgust plays a deeper role in people's everyday behaviour emerged only recently. It began when researchers decided to investigate the interplay between disgust and morality. One of the first was psychologist Jonathan Haidt at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, who in 2001 published a landmark paper proposing that instinctive gut feelings, rather than logical reasoning, govern our judgements of right and wrong.

Haidt and colleagues went on to demonstrate that a subliminal sense of disgust - induced by hypnosis - increased the severity of people's moral judgements about shoplifting or political bribery, for example (Psychological Science, vol 16, p 780). Since then, a number of studies have illustrated the unexpected ways in which disgust can influence our notions of right and wrong.

In 2008, Simone Schnall, now at the University of Cambridge, showed that placing people in a room with an unacknowledged aroma of fart spray and a filthy desk increased the severity of their moral judgements about, say, whether it's OK to eat your dead pet dog (Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, vol 34, p 1096) "One would think that one makes decisions about whether a behaviour is right or wrong by considering the pros and cons and arriving at a balanced judgement. We showed this wasn't the case," says Schnall.

Perhaps it's no surprise, then, to find that the more "disgustable" you are, the more likely you are to be politically conservative, says Pizarro, who has studied this correlation. Similarly, the more conservative that people are, the harsher their moral judgements become in the presence of disgust stimuli.

Together, these findings raise all sorts of interesting, and troubling, questions about people's prejudices, and the ways in which they might be influenced or even deliberately manipulated. Humanity already has a track record of using disgust as a weapon against "outsiders" - lower castes, immigrants and homosexuals. Nazi propaganda notoriously depicted Jewish people as filthy rats.

Now there is empirical evidence that inducing disgust can cause people to shun certain minority groups - at least temporarily. That's what Pizarro acquired his fart spray to explore. Along with Yoel Inbar of Tilburg University in the Netherlands and colleagues, he primed a room with the foul-smelling spray, then invited people in to complete a questionnaire, asking them to rate their feelings of warmth towards various social groups, such as the elderly or homosexuals. The researchers didn't mention the pong to the participants, who were a mix of heterosexual male and female US college students.

Reeking of prejudice

While the whiff did not influence people's feelings towards many social groups, one effect was stark: those in the smelly room, on average, felt less warmth towards homosexual men compared to participants in a non-smelly room. The effect was of equal strength among political liberals and conservatives (Emotion, vol 12, p 23). This finding is consistent with previous studies showing that a stronger susceptibility to disgust is linked with disapproval of gay people.

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