OPINION: Believe it or not, there is a scale for measuring how sensitive you are to disgust. It was co-developed by Jonathan Haidt in the mid-2000s, before he became a pop-psych celebrity by taking his research into the political realm. The disgust scale asks people how much they agree with statements like “I might be willing to eat monkey meat under some circumstances” and “It would bother me to see a rat run across my path in a park”, or how disgusting they find the thought of “a friend offers you a piece of chocolate shaped like dog poo” or “discovering an acquaintance drank from the glass you’re sipping on”.
If any of these made you go “Eww!” and scrunch up your nose (the universal sign you’re experiencing the emotion of disgust), then you may wish to turn the page …
I’m thinking about disgust because my wife texted on Monday to say she was worried our “wastewater” pump wasn’t a-pumping. I use quote marks because everything goes into that pump tank, not just water. So I headed home and spent almost an hour with my nose screwed up.
Human experience with toilets has a storied place in the history of psychological thinking. For instance, Freud proposed that our early experience of being toilet-trained lays part of the foundation for our personality. Mummy and Daddy get grumpy when you miss the potty, and you grow into an “anal retentive” personality – someone who can be obsessive, tightly controlled and stubborn. Later, psychoanalyst Karl Abraham suggested an alternative: a careless, rebellious and even sadistic “anal expulsive personality” developing when parents are excessively effusive when little Alex hits the target.
Nick Haslam, a professor at the University of Melbourne and author of a pop-psych book I wish I’d thought of – Psychology in the Bathroom – says that in spite of the intuitive attraction of these theories, there’s little evidence to back up the central claim that toileting influences personality to any great extent.
Haslam argues that psychology and psychologists spend much of their time understanding our internal mental lives, paying relatively little attention to things physical. Even when we do turn to think about bodies, we tend to “eliminate elimination”: excretion and excreta are either relatively absent from textbooks or hidden in dark corners. This is ironic because number ones and twos are up there with death and taxes for certainties. Notice that Haslam (and even I) have sought out euphemisms to safeguard the disgust-sensitive among the audience.
Haidt’s scale breaks disgust into three flavours, if you will. Core disgust reflects our disgust at putting offensive things in our mouths; animal-reminder disgust relates to things associated with death and our similarities to animals; and contamination disgust is associated with avoidance of disease through contamination.
This last is where dog poo-shaped chocolates and drinking from used glasses sit. Haidt would argue that it is protective – the product of evolutionary-span experience that has taught us to not eat the funny green meat or allow the contents of the potty to get near the kitchen.
We don’t like these reminders of our vulnerability to disease, so we don’t like to talk (or research) about them. But it’s also true that over-control, or loss of control, of our excretory equipment plays a role in a lot of psychopathology – phobias about touching disgusting things, anxiety over bladder-control, and that’s not even considering more common challenges such as bashful bladder when someone stands next to you at the urinal.
By the way, I got the pump working again. It was an electrical problem, and if I’d realised it sooner I wouldn’t have spent an hour shovelling, well, y’know.
