Moral and Social Uses of Disgust Across Cultures: A Review of Claims and Findings

Disgust is said to be a universal and basic emotion; yet its application to social and moral contexts has been a matter of controversy. In research within and across cultures, it has been debated how much disgust can outreach its pathogen-defence origins to regulate the exclusion of socially and morally undesirable people and groups. I first review English-language findings about moral disgust, compared to the close cousin emotion of anger. I conclude that English usage allows a moral sense of “disgust” that responds to uses of the body considered immoral and persons with bad moral character, but the overlap in features with pathogen disgust is strongest in violations of bodily morals. Cross-culturally, individual differences in disgust sensitivity have been shown to bear upon several moral attitudes such as tolerance of immigrants and sexual minorities, but these studies have not always been well set up to emphasize cultural differences or to rule out third-variable causes. More promising work comes from cross-linguistic studies of the state emotion words corresponding to moral content. Though these studies convincingly show diversity in use of terms translated “disgust”, I argue that their details point to two underlying feeling states –physical nausea, and a strong rejection-tinged disapproval – which English groups together under “disgust” and other languages, even remote ones such as Ifaluk, negotiate in their own way.