In Bad Taste: Evidence for the Oral Origins of Moral Disgust
Abstract
In common parlance, moral transgressions “leave a bad taste in the mouth.” This metaphor implies a link between moral disgust and more primitive forms of disgust related to toxicity and disease, yet convincing evidence for this relationship is still lacking. We tested directly the primitive oral origins of moral disgust by searching for similarity in the facial motor activity evoked by gustatory distaste (elicited by unpleasant tastes), basic disgust (elicited by photographs of contaminants), and moral disgust (elicited by unfair treatment in an economic game). We found that all three states evoked activation of the levator labii muscle region of the face, characteristic of an oralnasal rejection response. These results suggest that immorality elicits the same disgust as disease vectors and bad tastes.
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Supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and by the Canada Research Chairs Program (A.K.A.). We thank G. Cosgrove, S. Couto, R. Landy, A. Meyers, J. Robinson, and M. Sutrisno for assistance in collecting and processing the data, and W. Grabski for technical assistance.
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Published In
Science
Volume 323 | Issue 5918
27 February 2009
27 February 2009
Copyright
American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Submission history
Received: 5 September 2008
Accepted: 23 December 2008
Published in print: 27 February 2009
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www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/323/5918/1222/DC1
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