Final Quiz Flashcards
(62 cards)
What is the theory of Paul Rozin for disgust?
- Disgust evolved in humans from an initial mechanism that served to protect us from eating dangerous foods, to gradually underlie moral judgment
What is the behavior of disgust?
- Varied, distancing from whatever is making you feel disgusted
What are the physiological component of disgust?
- Associated with nausea (protective mechanism to inhibit eating)
- Increased salivation: helps get rid of any reminiscence of food in mouth
- Lowered heart rate: leads to slower processing of contaminated food
What is the expressive component of disgust?
- Focus on the face, includes gape (with or without extended tongue), retraction of upper lip and nose wrinkle
What is the subjective experience of disgust?
- qualia
- A sense of revulsion, pulling away, distaste
- Subjective experience in line with action tendency of withdrawal/avoidance
What is core disgust?
- Felt at the prospect of the oral incorporation of an offensive object
- Possibility or if it actually happens, just thinking about it (possibility) is disgusting
- What are the features of core disgust?
- Oral incorporation: taking things into body through mouth, taking on the properties of the food you eat
- Offensive entities: animals and products as potential foods, usually eat small subset of animals, animal is disguised (cow = beef, pork = pig)
- Contamination: real or symbolic contact of a potential food with something that is seen as offensive (adaptive mechanism to avoid disease), rejected if contaminated
How is contamination considered as a intuitive emotional level?
- Sympathetic magical law of contagion: does not follow rules of nature, once in contact always in contact
- Magical sympathetic law of similarity: what is superficially similar is in essence the same (dog feces made by chocolate)
How is a sense of contamination avoided?
- By framing
- Selection attention and encoding
- People do not think of what might disgust them
What is the animal-nature disgust?
- What reminds us that we are animals is disgusting
- Reminds us that we can die just like animals and animals are dirty
Why are we disgusted by violations of the body envelope (gaping wounds) or deformity?
- Wounds remind us that we have blood and body tissue like animals
- Deformity forces us to confront fragile nature of human body (bones and tissue like an animal)
How do we distance ourselves from our animal natures?
- Do this in a socially prescribed way
- Only eat certain animals in certain ways (food preparation)
- Excreting is done in bathroom
- Have sex with only certain other people and not animals
What do the large amount of ethnographic research show as evidence for how people consider animals?
- People consider themselves better than animals
- People maintain clear boundary between human and animal domain
What is rare cross culturally for how humans perceive animals?
- Treating animals like a person, like pet owners
- Pet owners turn the pet into a person so as to not deal with the pets animal nature
How do we perceive people who don’t respect limits on their behavior and body?
- They are seen as disgusting
- Seen to be like animals = dirty and no hygiene
What is the underlying issue for animal-nature disgust?
- Ones own death
- Disgusted by things that remind them of death
What are the different components of interpersonal disgust?
- Strangeness: don’t like what is foreign or strange
- Disease: Concern with others passing on a disease, contamination
- Misfortune: dont like to be in contact with others who suffer misfortune, fear of contagion or contamination
- Moral taint: concern with other who may not be morally correct or appropriate
What is moral disgust?
- People disgusted by immoral action
- One of three other condemning moral emotions (anger and contempt)
- Different types of violations of different ethical guidelines lead to either mostly moral disgust or contempt or anger
What is the terror management theory?
- People being unconsciously scared of their own death
- Manage this terror by embracing dominant values and norms
- Makes people feel part of a culture that will live beyond them and so in that sense they never die
What is ethics of divinity?
- Focus on the self as a spiritual entity
- Goal is tp protect entity from degrading or polluting
- Violations lead to emotion of disgust
- Disgust involves actual or threatened harm to ones psychological self (threat to soul)
What is the ethics of community?
- Focus on fulfilling ones social roles, duty and respecting hierarchy
- Violation lead to the emotions of contempt
What is ethics of autonomy?
- Focus on rights and justice
- Violations lead to the emotion of anger
What are the ideologies and attitudes of people with higher interpersonal disgust?
- More negative attitudes toward immigrants, foreigners, socially marginalized groups, AIDS, homosexuals, drug addicts
- More conservative ideologies, lead to more negative attitudes toward immigrants
What has been found in studies looking at moral outrage for both disgust and anger?
- Anger is related to moral outrage only if the person also feels at least a moderate amount of disgust
- Same for disgust
- Need combination of anger and disgust to feel moral outrage
- Both emotions increase certainty and so the combination is powerful influence on people