Disgust, Morality, and intergroup relations

Disgust, Morality, and Intergroup Relations

This post includes a brief overview of the current literature on how disgust relates to the Behavioural Immune system, dehumanisation, and intergroup relations. It concludes with an argument for examining if the measurement of social narratives motivated by disgust can predict intergroup conflict. Disgust and Disease:

Disgust plays a pivotal role in shaping individual behaviours, societal attitudes, and both cultural and moral norms. This is particularly relevant in in-group/out-group relations.

Disgust sentiment is central to disease avoidance. Oaten, Stevenson, and Case (2009) delve into this emotion's role as a guardian against potential contaminants, guiding us away from stimuli indicative of disease risk. This encompasses a broad range of triggers, from direct biological stimuli such as rotting food to human behaviours that risk the spread of disease. When faced with such stimuli, the emotion of disgust emerges, prompting behaviours that mitigate the risk of contamination.

The BIS and ingroup/outgroup relations:

The Behavioural Immune System (BIS) offers a compelling model through which we can understand the intricate interplay between disgust and intergroup relations. At its core, the BIS details the pre-emptive behavioural and psychological strategies humans have developed to stave off diseases without our bodies having to mount a biological immune response.

Schaller (2011) explores the broader social implications of this system. He suggests that, as disease can spread rapidly, and as pathogens are often undetectable through direct sensory means, the BIS has extended its sensitivity towards social and behavioural cues that suggest a risk, rather than presence, of infection. One such cue is perceived foreignness.

He writes:

“There are at least two distinct reasons why subjective ‘foreign-ness’ may implicitly connote an increased infection risk. First, exotic peoples may be host to exotic pathogens that can be especially virulent when introduced to a local population. Second, exotic peoples may be more likely to violate local behavioural norms (in domains pertaining to hygiene, food preparation, etc.) that serve as barriers to pathogen transmission. Thus, perceivers are likely to be hypersensitive to inferential cues that discriminate between familiar and foreign peoples and, when those cues are detected, they are likely to trigger the aversive, discriminatory responses associated with the behavioural immune system. This is especially likely to occur when perceivers feel especially vulnerable to infection."

The BIS further manifests itself at the societal level. As Schaller (2011) explains:

"Intriguingly, there is also cross-cultural evidence linking xenophobia and intergroup prejudice to worldwide ecological variation in the prevalence of pathogenic diseases. Ecological variation in pathogen prevalence is correlated with the percentage of people in a population who explicitly express intolerance for ‘people of a different race’ in their neighbourhood, and with regional frequency of ethnopolitical warfare. Additionally, collectivistic value systems—which emphasize sharp boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’—are especially likely to exist in social ecologies characterized historically by especially high levels of pathogen prevalence. Thus, just as with sociality in general, discriminatory sociality is predicted by infection risk not only at an individual level of analysis, but also at a population level of analysis.”

In short, the BIS causes a disgust driven aversion to outgroups when the identity or behaviour of such outgroups are associated with the risk of disease- especially when the risk of disease is prevalent. His research shows that this effect is significant enough to be measurable at both the individual level and the sociological level. One such outgroup identity is ‘perceived foreignness’. Readers of this blog will also note the relationship between the prevalence of infectious disease and ethnopolitical warfare. The implications this has for the relationship between immigrant and native communities are clear.

Disgust, Dehumanisation, and Violence:

Feelings of disgust for the other can go beyond passive aversion and avoidance. Sherman and Haidt (2011) posit that disgust towards a person possesses the capacity to dehumanise them in the mind of the disgusted party. They argue that, when confronted with stimuli that evoke strong disgust, individuals tend to perceive the source of that stimuli as less than fully human. This is not limited to perception- it is a process that can potentially strip the target of moral consideration, making mistreatment or harm towards them more palatable or even justifiable.

The processes by which groups or individuals are perceived as less than human are explored in depth by Holtz and Wagner (2011). They posit that outgroups can be denied uniquely human emotions through infrahumanisation, or be compared to animals or forces of nature through naturalisation. In both cases, the dehumanised group is excluded from the full set of moral considerations typically extended to 'true humans' by the ingroup.

Dehumanisation and the inhibition of violence:

Dehumanisation can reach genocidal extremes in the context of ingroup outgroup relations. Kelman (2014) delves into the dynamics behind violence that occurs without moral restraint. He suggests that the act of dehumanisation erodes the moral constraints typically in place against cruelty. When a group is no longer seen as human, the conventional moral rules governing interactions become inapplicable.

Fletcher (2014) provides an analysis of the prelude to the 1994 Tutsi Genocide in Rwanda, highlighting the role of the Mugesera speech. This speech used dehumanising rhetoric, positioning the Tutsis as threats and sub-humans, effectively setting the stage for the subsequent mass violence. In addition, historical evidence of dehumanisation is evident in the propaganda disseminated during World War II, particularly against Jews. An article titled "How to Tell a Jew" from the Nazi propaganda archives serves as an example, illustrating how rhetoric was used to depict Jews as the 'other', reinforcing stereotypes and furthering their dehumanisation.

Why Disgust Narratives?:

The literature reviewed thus far indicates that the BIS is a social defense mechanism which acts against the spread of disease. The BIS acts even when the risk of infection is not visibly present or noticeable, through encouraging the categorisation of some behaviours as inherently risky, and some groups of people as inherently prone to behaviours which risk disease. This can, under the right circumstances, make us averse to contact with persons perceived as belonging to a foreign outgroup. This aversion can manifest at the sociological level, such that periods of widespread illness correlate with both xenophobia and interethnic conflict. If such tensions and conflict are a result of the BIS spurring avoidant, aversive, and aggressive intergroup behaviours, then a measurement of the BIS at scale may be predictive of conflict.

The BIS is not a directly observable phenomenon, so any measurement must be of a highly related event, such as its triggers, mechanisms, or concurrent effects.

Regarding triggers-

While disease is measurable, the BIS also acts when the risk of infection is abstract. Such abstractions are learned and therefore socially informed. Worse still, they are often implicit. Any successful measurement of them would need to be deeply rooted in social and cultural context, and would therefore fail as a cost-effective and cross-cultural method.

Regarding mechanisms-

Disgust sentiment is highly associated with the BIS. It is therefore likely to be highly associated with the exclusionary behaviour the BIS can stoke- especially given that disgust is a key sentiment in moral judgement, as posited by Haidt (2001). This is further evidenced by the association between disgust driven intergroup narratives, the dehumanisation of a given outgroup, and the subsequent disinhibition of atrocities. If extreme disgust-driven dehumanisation by an in-group towards an out-group correlates with extreme forms of intergroup conflict, then it is reasonable to explore whether moderate disgust sentiment can predict moderate forms of intergroup conflict.

However, disgust sentiment would also be difficult to quickly directly measure at the sociological scale. Many traditional methods, such as questionnaires and facial cues, would not be cost effective at scale. Others, such as examining economic or sociological patterns of behaviour, cannot be methodologically removed from the context of the society under study, and would thus similarly fail at producing a cost-effective tool.

Regarding concurrent effects-

Sentiments spread through communication. Such communication is often verbal. Much grassroots verbal communication now occurs on the internet. As the following post will demonstrate, Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques can quickly and reliably measure a social sentiment towards an outgroup in a large dataset containing intragroup grassroots communication. This is done through a quantitative analysis of word collocations, which suggest the intensity and frequency of narratives motivated by a given sentiment, in turn suggesting the intensity of said sentiment within an ingroup.

If frequency and intensity of disgust driven intergroup narratives within intragroup grassroots communication can be reliably measured, they can be used as a signpost for rises and falls in social disgust sentiment- a key proximal mechanism of the BIS. As will be explored in later posts, such narratives may in addition be a cause of disgust sentiment and thus BIS inflammation through a perception of social consensus. Therefore, if the inflammation of the BIS is highly correlated with intergroup conflict, then disgust narratives may also be.

It is for these reasons that this project will begin with the development of cost-effective methods for the measurement of intergroup disgust narratives at scale. Further empirical study will make clear whether such a correlation exists, and whether the relationship is predictive.

The next post, Quantifying Disgust, will entail my method to measure such disgust driven intergroup narratives, and explore how this might be done with a method independent of cultural context.