ABSTRACT
W hat would a world without disgust look like? For one, people would likely get sick more often. There is growing consensus among researchers that the emotion of disgust evolved to protect individuals from potential sources of disease (such as pathogens and poisons). Disgust can be understood as part of a broader set of mechanisms that likely evolved for the purpose of defending us from disease – what some psychologists have referred to as our “behavioral immune system” (Schaller & Duncan, 2007 ). Yet recent psychological evidence suggests that a world without disgust would also look different in a way that might be more surprising: it would be a more politically liberal world. Indeed, a number of recent fi ndings have demonstrated that individuals who are more easily disgusted tend to be politically conservative, and that inducing people to experience disgust tends to shift their judgments toward the more conservative end of the political spectrum. In what follows, we argue that these effects are best explained as a result of disgust’s primary function in preventing physical contamination, but that a deeper look at the fi ndings demonstrates that disgust bears no special relationship to either political or moral judgment. Rather, we argue that the most robust and reliable effects of disgust on political and moral judgment are on judgments regarding acts, issues, individuals, and groups that possess cues regarding the potential for physical contamination.
