From Behave (Robert Sapolsky, 2018) pp561-2
The linking of visceral and moral disgust is bidirectional. As shown in a number of studies, contemplating a morally disgusting act leaves more than a metaphorical bad taste in your mouth – people eat less immediately afterward, and a neutral-tasting beverage drunk afterward is rated as having a more negative taste (and, conversely, hearing about virtuous moral acts made the drink taste better.
In chapters 12 and 13 we saw the political implications of our brains intermixing visceral and moral disgust-social conservatives have a lower threshold for visceral disgust than do social progressives; the “Wisdom of repugnance” school posits that being viscerally disgusted by something is a pretty good indicator that it is morally wrong; implicitly evoking a sense of visceral disgust (e.g., by sitting in close proximity to a foul odor) makes us more socially conservative. This is not merely because visceral disgust is an aversive state – inducing a sense of sadness, rather than disgust, doesn’t have the same effect; moreover, moralizing about purity, while predicted by people’s propensity toward feeling disgust, is not predicted by propensities toward fear or anger.
The physiological core of gustatory disgust is to protect yourself against pathogens. The core of the intermixing of visceral and moral disgust is a sense of threat as well. A socially conservative stance about, say, gay marriage is not just that it is simply wrong in an abstract sense, or even “disgusting,” but that it constitutes a threat-to the sanctity of marriage and family values. This element of threat is shown in a great Study in which subjects either did or didn’t read an article about the health risks of airborne bacteria. All then read a history article that used imagery of America as a living organism, with statements like “Following the Civil War, the United States underwent a growth spurt.” Those who read about scary bacteria before thinking about the United States as an organism were then more likely to express negative views about immigration (without changing attitudes about an economic issue). My guess is that people with a stereotypically conservative exclusionary stance about immigration rarely have the sense that they feel disgusted that people elsewhere in the world would want to come to the United States for better lives. Instead there is threat by the rabble, the unwashed masses, to the nebulous entity that is the American way of life.
How cerebral is this intertwining of moral and visceral disgust? Does the insula get involved in moral disgust only if it’s of a particularly visceral nature – blood and guts, coprophagia, body parts? Paul Bloom suggests this is the case. In contrast, Jonathan Haidt feels that even the most cognitive forms of moral disgust (“He’s a chess grand master and he shaman by beating that eight-year-old in three moves and reducing her to tears – that’s disgusting”) are heavily intertwined.” In support of that, something as universal as getting a lousy offer in an economic game activates the insula (a lousy offer from another human, rather than a computer, that is); the more insula activation, the greater the likelihood of the offer being rejected. Amid this debate, it is clear that the intertwining of visceral and moral disgust is, at the least, greatest when the latter taps into core disgust. To repeat a neat quote from Paul Rozin, introduced in chapter 11, “Disgust serves as an ethnic or out-group marker.” First you’re disgusted by how Others smell, a gateway to then being disgusted by how Others think.
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