How Manipulators Use Disgust to Hijack Our Brain
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Disgust is an incredibly powerful negative emotion, capable of inducing vomiting, panic, and rage. The sound evolutionary reason for our experience of disgust is that it helped keep us alive—by making repellent the tastes, sights, smells, and other sensations associated with death, rottenness, or toxicity. So when your refrigerator smells wrong and, upon inspection, you find that the culprit is a piece of chicken that has gone south, you feel nauseated by something that just a week ago made your stomach growl with anticipation. And instead of eating the bad meat, you throw it out.
An important part of the brain that helps govern this process is the insula, which works to keep us safe by alerting us to pathogens in our environment that might harm us. But if the insula is damaged, disgust can decrease or disappear. Scholars in 2016 showed this in an experiment involving patients with neurodegenerative diseases that affect the insula; compared with controls, the patients who had compromised insula response reported experiencing less disgust when they viewed television and film scenes that featured something disgusting, such as Trainspotting’s infamous drugs-down-the-toilet scene.
[Read: How to cultivate disgust]
Over time, disgust stimuli extended beyond pathogens to include not just physical phenomena but also behavioral actions, such as seeing someone do something you find objectionable. Indeed, certain immoral actions or opinions that you perceive as dangerous can elicit disgust. So if you feel strongly about, say, the environment, a person expressing what you consider a terrible viewpoint about pollution or climate change can make you feel a visceral disgust for that person—almost like something you’ve tracked in on your shoe.
If this now begins to sound a little dangerous—because your disgust reflex could be vulnerable to manipulation and exploitation by an unscrupulous demagogue who can tweak your insula—you are right to be concerned. Scholars have shown that political communication can activate the public’s sensitivity for disgust. You may have noticed that demagogic leaders tend to use disgust-based language for out-groups: The Nazis often referred to Jews as rats, and Hutu leaders in Rwanda called Tutsis cockroaches in the run-up to the genocide there. These were clearly efforts to associate people with creatures that spread disease and to inflame public revulsion.
Fortunately, it can’t happen here, right? Well, think of the last time someone in American politics, media, or public life—perhaps someone who shares your views—referred to others as “disgusting,” said that opponents were “trash” or “vermin,” or called their convictions a “mind virus.” This rhetoric was intended to stimulate your insula, provoking the panic and rage that come with disgust, and make you more willing to take actions based on hate.
The political leaders and ideological activists who are adept at triggering your disgust to serve their purposes are hard to escape: Their claims on your attention are ever more intrusive in our always-on media culture. But if you can recognize their technique of evoking disgust, you can also find ways to prevent their machinations from working on you.
The abuse of human disgust to provoke hatred is highly manipulative, and suggestive of so-called dark-triad personalities, about whom I have written previously in this column (I recently launched a short dark-triad quiz inspired by this 2014 paper, if you are curious about where you fall on the spectrum). They are the 7 percent of a recent study’s international population sample who display dominant traits of narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy, and they make life miserable if you have dealings with them in work or love. We all have known people like this personally, and suffered as a result. Getting away from them is always the right strategy.
No doubt, many advocates for ideological causes are good and virtuous, and even those who are neither of those things are not necessarily dark-triad types. But scholars have found that people who score highly in certain dark-triad characteristics are associated with participation in politics and involvement in activism. This can lead to a phenomenon known as “virtuous victimhood,” wherein activists try to stake out a moral high ground based on claims of mistreatment rather than on righteous actions. Dark-triad activists can be found on both the left and the right, turning our democracy into a Hobbesian struggle for power and twisting efforts to achieve social change into vindictive cancel culture.
[Arthur C. Brooks: The sociopaths among us—and how to avoid them]
It doesn’t take too many shrewd influencers to spread disgust, because the emotion is highly contagious. Researchers have shown that when people watch video clips of the faces of people who are disgusted, this observation alone activates the viewers’ own insula. That is what enables a climate of political or social polarization to easily take hold in a culture, so that just a few influential manipulators with an audience can convince many others that a viewpoint contrary to their own is an existential threat—and that those with opposing or different views are disgusting, in effect a dangerous human pathogen in our society.
In history’s worst cases, this dynamic has led to genocide. That seems a remote threat in the America of 2024, yet the phenomenon can still make solidarity across differing segments of society impossible, and explain many of our ongoing polarization problems today. America’s crisis of civility, whether in the Capitol in Washington, D.C., or on college campuses, owes much to the manipulation of disgust on either side of the aisle.
For years, researchers thought that political conservatives were especially susceptible, but recent research has shown that this is not true; their sensitivity depends on the issue at hand. For example, conservatives do tend to feel disgust for behavior such as consuming illegal drugs or disturbing a church service, but liberals feel disgust when witnessing environmental pollution or xenophobia. An interesting recent example of this was the coronavirus, which appeared to elicit less disgust among conservatives than among liberals.
[From the March 2024 issue: The ride of techno-authoritarianism]
One key to breaking malign actors’ grip on our insulae is precisely the knowledge of how it works. Researchers who in 2022 were studying ways to lower disgust sensitivity in patients dealing with obsessive-compulsive disorder found that an effective way to do so is through education about how disgust works. Next time a leader encourages you to feel disgusted by the way other people think about immigration, climate change, or criminal justice, just say, “Hands off my insula, buddy.”
Another way to fight off the efforts of disgust influencers is to increase your exposure to whatever they’re trying to manipulate your negative reaction to. Dutch food scholars in 2021 looked at the main public barrier to sustainable food alternatives such as laboratory-cultivated meat and edible insects—foodstuffs that would typically provoke a disgust response in many cultures. The researchers found that the best way to break down this barrier was through increased exposure to these alternatives.
I will confess that I have no desire to eat bugs. But I have found in my own work and life that my disgust for others’ beliefs decreases when I meet in person the people who hold them. I suspect that this is one reason activist leaders seem to enforce a purity culture in their movement and can be so eager to cast out opponents with “problematic” views. If you actually meet the problematic person, you will find it harder to maintain a dehumanizing disgust for them, misguided though you may think they are.
While you are working to avoid the manipulation of your insula by leaders and activists, make sure that you are not inadvertently spreading disgust: Remember that disgust is contagious when people witness it in us. Notwithstanding your feelings about others and their beliefs, endeavor to eradicate language that expresses loathing and contempt toward them.
You might have one last question lurking after reading all of this: What if some people truly do deserve your disgust? What if their behaviors and beliefs are so reprehensible that you should consider them to be social disease vectors?
As a social scientist working in the center of conventional American discourse on social and political issues, I would humbly ask you to consider whether you can think of moments when you have been unduly influenced by an activist or leader to revile an opponent, and regretted that manipulation later. But even if you can be sure that no one’s been tampering with your insula, consider what your goal is in the causes you espouse. If it is to change society, then you will need to change others’ opinions—and people rarely change their mind if they feel that they’re seen and portrayed as an object of disgust.