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"Eeeww, gross!"

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As an adult we don’t eat feces or drink out of bedpans—even if we are told they are germ-free; we find the thought of those actions disgusting. The mere thought of eating fudge shaped as feces or drinking juice from a brand new, clean bed pan, causes our faces to constrict in disgust. These things are gross. When I show my Intro to Psychology course a video of a young infant eating said fudge they all cringe and turn from the screen, horrified at the lack of disgust the infants show.

A recent paper by developmental psychologists Kristin Shutts, Katherine Kinzler and Jasmine DeJesus does a great job summarizing the research in this area. Here’s what we know so far—in infancy, children don’t seem to show much disgust. They eat many things that adults find disgusting including bodily fluids and excrements. By about preschool age children start to be disgusted a bit more—showing disgust reactions when asked to eat ice cream with ketchup on it or smelling a gross odor . Even later children adopt concepts like contamination into their disgust repertoire—feeling that something can be gross by virtue of its history, even if it doesn’t look so bad right now (you’d be unlikely to eat a plate of spaghetti that previously contained a cockroach even if the cockroach had since moved on).

But as adults we don’t just find  physical objects or  smells disgusting, we feel disgust thinking about people’s moral actions. When I tell my students about scenarios created by Jon Haidt, like one famously describing siblings who willingly and happily engage in intercourse with one another, their response is just as cringe-worthy as when I describe a kid licking a public bus seat. For decades now researchers have been interested in how and why disgust emerges as well as why we apply the same emotional reactions to situations as diverse as gross foods and other people’ sociomoral actions. 

Perhaps most intriguingly to me, researchers have started looking at when the connection between physical disgust and moral disgust starts in human development. The discoveries to date suggest this connection is made surprisingly early. Developmental psychologists Judith Donavitch and Paul Bloom found that young children, as early as kindergarten, apply the term “disgusting” to both physical actions like putting your hand in slime and to moral violations, like being very mean to someone (an act which we as adults are actually unlikely to call disgusting). Importantly, they found children do not just use “disgusting” to describe just any negative action: they selectively apply it to moral violations and not to negative actions like failing a test. So it seems that despite picking up on disgust relatively late (compared to other kinds of emotions), already by around age 5 years children know this unique connection between physical and moral disgust.  


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