Disgust is one of the 6 main emotions everyone experiences. We wouldn’t normally think that disgust plays that big of a role in our lives, but we actually experience disgust every day. Disgust can be described as “something revolting, primarily in relation to the sense of taste”. The reason that disgust is a primary emotion stems from the evolutionary perspective; things that aren’t healthy to eat often taste bad. Long ago when people needed to find their own food, they also needed to make sure the food was safe to eat. Experiencing disgust when eating rotten foods prevented people from eating more of that food, therefore saving them from possible food poisoning. Today, we attribute disgust to many more situations besides just bad food. We think sexual relations of two people that are very different in age is disgusting; we think bad smells are disgusting even though we’d never have that bad smelling object in our mouth.
There are many things that are universally thought of as disgusting, however there are many things that some people find disgusting that others don’t. Interestingly, there are gender differences when it comes to disgust, and certain reasons why those gender differences occur. Women tend to show greater disgust sensitivity than men. In order to study differences in disgust, the 3 domain disgust scale was created which measures disgust levels of pathogens, sexual and moral domains. A study was conducted by members of the department of Psychology in Amsterdam, and the results were as follows.
One domain measured in this study is moral disgust. Some of the questions resulted in similar disgust levels for both men and women. One of these was deceiving a friend, and this may be because there is a universal understanding about what a friendship is and what the relationship entails. This means that if a man or woman was to deceive his or her friend, he or she would feel similar levels of disgust. On the other hand, men and women feel differently about other moral issues, such as cheating on a test to get good grades. Women were more disgusted by this, and we are led to believe that cheating brings along feelings of guilt that men are better able to deal with than women.
Sexual disgust is another domain in which there are both similarities and differences among men and women. Both men and women have identical feelings about watching pornography. This may be because sexual activity is an animalistic behavior, and we don’t like to think that we act like animals.
Another domain where there are significant differences in men and women’s disgust level is bringing someone you just met back to your room to have sex. This may be due to the double standard; it is commonly accepted for men to sleep with multiple women; it often results in praise from other men. If a woman were to sleep around with many men, she would be considered promiscuous.
The double standard can be explained by the "master key" analogy; if a key opens a bunch of locks, it's called a master key, but if a lock is opened by a bunch of keys it's just a bad lock.
While some areas of disgust are considered equally disgusting by both men and women, overall women are more sensitive to disgust than men. Women feel worse when experiencing guilt, and women tie emotions into sex whereas men are less apt to.
Citations:
Citations:
Tybur, J. (2009). Microbes, mating, and morality: individual differences in three functional domains of disgust. Retrieved from http://www.csom.umn.edu/assets/137596.pdf
Tybur, J. (2011). Personality and individual differences. 343-348. Retrieved from http://www.debralieberman.com/downloads/pubs/2011_PAID.pdf
Rohrmann, S. (2008). Gender differences in psychophysiological responses to disgust. 22, 65-75. Retrieved from http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=buy.optionToBuy&id=2008-07565-001
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