How Disgust Explains Everything – The New York Times

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The most important accounts of disgust after Darwin come from a pair of Hungarian men, Aurel Kolnai (born 1900) and Andras Angyal (1902), born two years apart. I could not find any evidence that they knew each other, but it is unlikely that Angyal, whose paper of disgust appeared in 1941, did not draw from his countryman’s newspaper published in 1929. Sending to Kolnai. One possibility is that Angyal did not cite his sources. A second possibility was that he was truly unaware of the previous article, so you have to wonder if anything abnormally abominable happened in central Europe in the early 20th century that two foreigners born there were led to lengthy research on a subject. someone took it more seriously.

A third possibility is that Angyal starts reading Kolnai’s article and gives up halfway through in frustration. While great, Kolnai’s writing has osmium density. Her newspaper is filled with frightening quotes and sentences layered in a baklava-like profusion. However, Kolnai was the first to arrive at a set of insights now widely accepted in the field. He pointed to the paradox that nasty stuff is often a “weird temptress” – think of the Q-tip you examine after removing a wax from an ear canal, or the existence of plastic surgery-related reality-TV shows, or the “Fear Factor.” He identified the senses of smell, taste, sight, and touch as primary entry sites, noting that hearing is not a strong vector for disgust. “It would be futile to seek an approximate equivalent parallel to something in the auditory field, such as a putrid odor, a limp body sensation, or a ripped belly feeling.”

The exemplary object of disgust for Kolnai was the rotting corpse, which showed him that the disgust was not man-made. truth decay but process from him. Consider the difference between a corpse and a skeleton. While both provide evidence that death has occurred, a corpse is disgusting, with a skeleton being extremely creepy at worst. (Hamlet wouldn’t raise a buffoon’s rotting head and speak to him.) Kolnai argued that the difference had to do with the dynamic nature of a rotting corpse: it changes color and shape, producing a changing range of scents and odors. in other ways he asserted the existence of life in death.

Angyal argued that disgust is definitely not sensory. We may experience colors, sounds, tastes, and smells as unpleasant, but they can never be repulsive on their own. For example, he told a story about walking in a field and passing a cottage where a pungent odor from a rotting animal pierced his nostrils. His first reaction was intense disgust. In the next moment, he discovered that he had made a mistake and that the smell was actually glue. “The feeling of disgust immediately disappeared, and the smell now seemed quite pleasant,” he wrote, “probably because of the rather pleasant associations with carpentry.” Of course, then you probably paste made it came from dead animals, but the insult had been neutralized by nothing more than Angyal’s altered mental connotations.

Angyal claimed that disgust is not just smelling a bad odour; It was an instinctive fear of being contaminated by the smell. The closer the contact, the stronger the reaction. Angyal’s work is even more enjoyable when viewed in the context of the preface, which explains that the material is based on observations and conversations “not collected in any formal way” and that the “if it can be called so” method is incomplete. Objectivity and control. Reading the newspaper 80 years later, a replication crisis in the sciences continues to unfoldThe humility of Angyal takes on a refreshing taste. I’m just a guy who notices things, it’s like saying. Let’s see where this leads.

my first meeting Rozin at a Vietnamese restaurant on the Upper West Side in midsummer. He came with a tang-colored bucket hat and a pinstripe navy blue shirt. After ordering, we sat at a yellow wooden table and ate rice pancakes filled with various herbal elements. Rozin had ordered a green-papaya salad to share, and as she ate the papaya, she noted, “it’s, at the moment, a kind of social bond – eating from the same bowl.” (He and a team have studied this.) One of the fun things about hanging out with a research psychologist is that he can helpfully write down explanations for all kinds of immediate phenomena, and in Rozin’s case, he may even have postulated the explanations himself. . To give an example, our pancakes were about the width of basketballs—enough to easily feed six—and yet each of us polished the jumbo portion. “Unit bias” is the heuristic that Rozin and his co-authors invented in 2006 to explain the effect. The idea is that people tend to assume that there is an appropriate and optimal amount to consume a supplied unit of an asset. That’s why the popcorn and oversized marshmallows in the movie are dangerous, and probably one reason why the French public – with their traditionally small portions – stay lean.

Rozin, now 85, was born in Brooklyn’s Flatbush neighborhood to a Jewish family who, although they didn’t go to college themselves, were cultured and artistic and glad to discover that their son was intelligent. She took an exam at a public school for gifted children, dropped out of high school early, and won a full scholarship to the University of Chicago, which she graduated just after her 16th birthday. After graduation, he received a joint doctorate degree. He completed his postdoctoral studies in biology and psychology at Harvard, the Harvard School of Public Health, and joined the University of Pennsylvania’s faculty in 1963, where his early experiments focused on the behavior of mice and goldfish. As Rozin rapidly progressed from assistant professor to associate professor to professor, she decided she was tired of animal studies and wanted to focus on bigger games.

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