Pod Insights Hidden Brain Yuck! The Science of Disgust About this episode Disgust is a strong emotion, one designed by evolution to protect us from danger and diseases. But disgust also spills into other areas of our lives, influencing our morals, our intuitions about right and wrong, even our politics. We talk with psychologist David Pizarro about how disgust is used to persuade and divide us, and why it remains such a potent force in public life today. Then, in our latest installment of “Your Questions Answered,” Huggy Rao returns to respond to listeners’ thoughts and questions about why big ideas fail.
Transcript 15,858 words · 8 speakers
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0:00 Shankar Vedantam? This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. When David Pizarro was five years old, he was at a weekly church meeting with his family. The grownups went to visit with each other while the children, including David, were left to their own devices.
0:15 Speaker 01 And my sister and her little friend thought that they would play a fun game with me. And that game involved making me lie down, close my eyes, and open my mouth.
0:26 Shankar Vedantam? They wouldn't tell David what was going to happen. It was to be a surprise.
0:32 Speaker 01 I, sort of naively trusting of my dear older sister, who by the way is an attorney now,
0:41 Speaker 01 sure enough, closed my eyes and opened my mouth. And I felt something soft, wet, and sort of cold in my mouth. And I immediately spit, opened my eyes, and I saw my sister and her little friend laughing.
1:02 Shankar Vedantam? If you're eating something right now, I'd advise you to put it down.
1:06 Speaker 01 What they had put in my mouth was, I don't recall exactly what food it was, but it was partially chewed food that the other little girl had decided to chew up, put in her hand, and then stick right in my mouth.
1:25 Shankar Vedantam? David's sister and her friend thought the whole thing was hilarious.
1:30 Speaker 01 I've never felt so betrayed.
1:34 Speaker 01 This is one of the key moments in my life where I was so disgusted. I don't remember throwing up, but I can tell you for sure that I felt like throwing up. And I, to this day, can remember the texture, the temperature, the feeling of that food in my mouth.
1:55 Shankar Vedantam? Wow. As you're telling the story, I have to confess, I can feel my stomach turning, David.
2:01 Speaker 01 I apologize.
2:04 Speaker 01 My sister is a lovely, wonderful person now. I have not forgiven her, but I won't hold it against her.
2:16 Shankar Vedantam? Disgust is a profound emotion. It doesn't just shape childhood pranks. It also shapes our relationships, our values, who we choose as friends, and who we think of as foes. In fact, disgust turns out to be so powerful, so primal, that pollsters and politicians are using it to manipulate us today. The psychology of disgust. This week on Hidden Brain.
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4:27 Shankar Vedantam? Disgust is an emotion we all feel. It's that strong reaction we get when we sense something unpleasant. A foul odor, spoiled food, toxic waste. Disgust doesn't just shape our perceptions, it transforms our behavior. Take a bite of a rotten cucumber and we might never eat a cucumber again. See a dead fly in our soup and we might never return to a restaurant again and might even swear off soup. At Cornell University, psychologist David Pizarro studies disgust. He's interested in how it shapes the way we see the world. David Pizarro, welcome to Hidden Brain.
5:04 Speaker 01 Thank you.
5:06 Shankar Vedantam? David, in 1960, the US presidential race featured a sitting vice president, Richard Nixon, and a senator named John F. Kennedy. Now, JFK's youth and inexperience was seen as major vulnerabilities, and it was the first presidential race where the candidates faced off in a debate on television.
5:26 Speaker 03 The candidates need no introduction. The Republican candidate, Vice President Richard M. Nixon, and the Democratic candidate, Senator John F. Kennedy.
5:35 Shankar Vedantam? Can you paint me a picture of what happened when viewers tuned into that debate?
5:40 Speaker 01 Yeah, well, you know, Nixon had an advantage, the polls were showing. As you said, John F. Kennedy was young and fairly inexperienced. And in preparation for these debates, Kennedy actually did some decent preparing.
5:59 Speaker 03 The question before the American people is, are we doing as much as we can do? Are we as strong as we should be? Are we as strong as we must be if we're going to maintain our independence?
6:10 Speaker 01 He had met with people about how he would look, about his appearance. Nixon, on the other hand... Maybe because he had recently been hospitalized, maybe just because he didn't take it seriously or didn't know. Got into the debates looking pale, sickly, sweaty.
6:30 Speaker 04 For the status quo, I do believe that he would agree that I am just as sincere in believing that my proposals for federal aid to education, my proposals for healthcare.
6:42 Shankar Vedantam? And once the debate got underway, I understand, you know, Nixon had not used any makeup when he went before the television cameras, and it can get pretty hot under those lights.
6:53 Speaker 01 Yeah, and those lights used to be extremely hot. And so what the US was able to see on these live televised debates was a person who looked a little bit diseased, perhaps, not at his best. In fact, Nixon's sweaty, pale appearance with no makeup. Of course, now we understand that to be on a camera at all, we always put on makeup.
7:21 Speaker 01 Nixon looked so bad that even his mother was concerned and reached out to him afterwards, wondering if he was OK.
7:37 Shankar Vedantam? Now, it's hard to know what the effect of one debate was on the outcome of the race, but many presidential scholars think the debate did undermine Nixon. So JFK came off as fresh and youthful, and Nixon came across as, you know, unshaven and sweaty.
7:53 Speaker 01 Yeah, most people just generally agree that this was a turning point in that election. Like you say, we can never know about the substance, but we know now from decades of research that appearance matters, that the way in which these candidates presented themselves had perhaps an undue effect on public opinion at the time. But of course, at the time, we didn't realize what a strong influence the appearance of the candidates would have.
8:22 Shankar Vedantam? Let's move forward to more recent history. During the US presidential debate on September 10th, 2024, Republican candidate Donald Trump made a claim about immigrants in Springfield, Ohio.
8:36 Speaker 05 In Springfield, they're eating the dogs, the people that came in. They're eating the cats. They're eating, they're eating the pets of the people that live there.
8:48 Shankar Vedantam? Where did this claim come from, David?
8:50 Speaker 01 Well, it seems as if this was a rumor started by a local Facebook group out there in Springfield, Ohio, claiming that a local cat had been butchered. And, you know, some far-right neo-Nazi groups took that claim and ran and started claiming that these were Haitian immigrants that were stealing and eating local pets.
9:14 Shankar Vedantam? Now, the claim was quickly debunked, but I understand it had some pretty profound consequences when, you know, people started to imagine the scenes of these immigrants, basically, essentially eviscerating and eating, you know, the local pets.
9:28 Speaker 01 Yeah, you know, it took on a life of its own. And as we now know, debunking isn't always so effective because once people began spreading this, it almost didn't matter what the truth was. People in Springfield started getting bomb threats. There were evacuations of public buildings, including the city hall. Local Haitian immigrants were reporting that they were being harassed and that they feared for their safety.
9:55 Shankar Vedantam? I remember when I heard the story, you know, I wasn't sure about the veracity of the story, but it was such an emotionally powerful story. I remember feeling, recoiling in some ways of the idea of people, you know, cutting open cats and dogs and eating them.
10:09 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think that's probably a pretty common response that we all had. I mean, if, if there was a story that would get at the heart of especially Americans, it would be something to do with being mean to our dogs, but in that particularly grisly way.
10:35 Shankar Vedantam? So, speaking of Donald Trump, in 2019, a 20-foot balloon was paraded down the streets of London. It depicted the once and future US president. What was remarkable about this balloon, David?
10:49 Speaker 01 Well, when they designed the balloon, they decided to make President Trump a giant baby. There was even a hashtag #diaperdawn that sort of was viral because of the power of this image.
11:05 Shankar Vedantam? So, all the examples we've discussed, a sweaty presidential candidate, a claim about immigrants eating dogs and cats, the depiction of Donald Trump as a baby in a diaper, all of these events seem to be cut from the same cloth, David. What do these stories induce in us?
11:28 Speaker 01 Well, at least one of the things that they all induce in me and many other people is the emotion of disgust, right? There is something that makes us recoil, a word that I believe you used, Shankar, makes us have a visceral sense of aversion against these images, these thoughts.
11:47 Shankar Vedantam? Now, I've always associated disgust with, you know, yucky smells or food that I dislike. But what these examples are showing is that disgust is not just in the realm of what we eat or what we smell, it's also in the realm of public life and in politics.
12:03 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's one of the interesting things about this emotion. Many scholars, in fact, I think most scholars who study the emotion of disgust would agree that if it has a function, you know, if it has a purpose, that purpose is to prevent us from getting sick from contamination by touching something that might make us sick. But that emotion does seem to have expanded, and it actually is easy to elicit and is often elicited in our everyday life.
12:43 Shankar Vedantam? From shaping elections to influencing our ideologies, disgust turns out to play a big role in politics and public life.
12:53 Shankar Vedantam? When we come back, how an emotion that evolved to keep us safe from germs and pathogens is increasingly being weaponized in public life. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.
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14:41 Shankar Vedantam? This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Picture this: you walk into a bathroom at a gas station. The fluorescent lights flicker on and cockroaches scatter. You step into the stall. The floor is slick with an unidentifiable slimy sludge, and the toilet looks like it hasn't been flushed in a while. Now, take a moment to notice your reaction. Is your lip curling? There's a good chance your whole face has contorted into a grimace. Disgust will do that to you. At Cornell University, psychologist David Pizarro is interested in the psychology of disgust and how it shapes our lives in unseen ways.
15:25 Shankar Vedantam? So, David, is disgust emotional or something biological?
15:30 Speaker 01 Well, it's a good question. It's a little of both, right? I mean, most of our emotions, as we understand them, are produced by our biology. But your question is getting to something that I think is extra interesting about disgust. Because disgust, perhaps unlike some of our other emotions, seems so tied to our biology. On the one hand, it's tied to our biology because it's so related to the things that we touch and that we eat that might make us sick. So, in that sense, it feels like a biological emotion, a biological response. But it's also very reflexive. It doesn't require a whole lot of thought.
16:13 Speaker 01 So, some of our emotions require us to have opinions or to make judgments about the world. Disgust doesn't seem to take that much. So, that feeling that I had of the texture of the food that got put in my mouth, that was such an immediate reflexive, negative reaction that some people actually prefer to call disgust something like a reflex rather than an emotion.
16:41 Shankar Vedantam? So disgust shapes our lives from the time we are very young to when we are very old. When you were in the fifth grade, you and many of your classmates picked on a kid. What did this kid do to set you off?
16:54 Speaker 01 You know, this is a sad story for me because the kid did nothing. The kid, you know, this, this young boy was a normal, fun, intelligent young boy. But there was something that he had that really brought out the worst in us. And that was he would come to school smelling bad. I don't know what the smell was. I don't know why he had it. It smelled like he was unwashed. It smelled maybe a little bit like he had a dirty diaper even. And because of that, we shunned him. We spoke about it behind his back. And unfortunately, I think that his social life suffered because of our inability to look past that disgust.
17:47 Shankar Vedantam? So disgust might have evolved to protect us from danger, to keep us from eating rotten food, but it also prompts us toward cruelty?
17:55 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's right. So it's like many things that have evolved via natural selection. It's an imperfect mechanism. It's a very efficient mechanism to keep us from, like you said, ingesting things that might be dangerous for us. So a lot of people talk about sort of parasite avoidance or disease avoidance. It works well like that. But of course, it's not perfect because the way that it works is that it responds, it is elicited by certain cues that just tend to be correlated with things that might be bad for you. So particular smells that, that might be associated with something that's dangerous to touch
18:36 Speaker 01 or eat are going to make us feel disgusted. But of course, not everything that makes us sick is disgusting to us. And many things that are disgusting to us pose no danger whatsoever.
18:50 Shankar Vedantam? So disgust can also make us do irrational things. You and others have looked at the role of disgust in medicine like screenings for certain kinds of cancer.
18:59 Speaker 01 Yeah, in fact, a lot of people may avoid engaging in behaviors that are good for them because they have concerns surrounding disgust. So for instance, people might not get colorectal screening because they're grossed out at the thought of doing this procedure, or they might actually be concerned that the medical practitioners themselves will be grossed out at them, at their own bodies. And so disgust can play this powerful motivating role in unfortunately leading us to do things that aren't good for us.
19:41 Shankar Vedantam? We've had the great psychologist Paul Rosin on Hidden Brain before, and he's done a lot of work in this area, looking at how disgust influences our thoughts and preferences. One of the things he has explored is the idea of contagion when it comes to disgust. Can you explain what this is, David?
20:00 Speaker 01 The idea with disgust that separates it, in my opinion, from many of our other emotions, is that it spreads through contagion, through contamination, as Paul Rosin pointed out. So if I touch something that is disgusting, I am now disgusting to many people. And other emotions don't seem to work this way, right? So if I'm afraid of a lion, and Shankar, you go and you get close to that lion, I am not now afraid of you, right? There is nothing in the contact between you and the lion that has transferred. But disgust seems to work
20:41 Speaker 01 on this principle of association, of contact. Things can get contaminated with each other, and that's how disgust sort of transmits, how it spreads.
20:51 Shankar Vedantam? Why is it that this contagion only works in one direction? So, you know, a single cockroach on a platter of food can make the whole thing inedible, but pouring, you know, a gallon of honey on a cockroach doesn't make it less disgusting?
21:05 Speaker 01 It's very, yeah, this is what Paul Rosin does refer to as this negativity dominance. And it's a very interesting feature. My best guess at what's going on here is that consistent with what disgust has evolved to do, disgust has evolved to, as we've said now many times, keep us from contamination, keep us from getting diseases. And the way that that germs work is that coming into contact with something that has germs can pass germs in that way. So one small thing that might make my cup of soup contaminated, that might make me sick, cannot be reversed in the other way.
21:50 Speaker 01 You can't give, you can't put a little bit of soup in all the viruses and make things okay.
21:56 Shankar Vedantam? Now, Paul Rosin and others have found that people still feel disgust even when there is no threat at all. So it's one thing to say, you know, a fly in your soup makes the whole bowl of soup inedible. But even when there is no threat at all, Paul Rosin and others find that disgust still works, it's contamination magic. Tell me about the sympathetic magical law of contagion.
22:21 Speaker 01 Yeah, well, Rosin, he brought together this idea that in traditional cultures, magic works through this sympathetic transmission. And disgust seems to be magical like that as well. That is magical in the sense that even when we know physically that there is no danger, we can't shake the fact that we're disgusted by something. So to give you an example, and this comes from studies that Rosin and many others have done, even if I can let you know that I am sterilizing a cockroach, right, that there is absolutely no danger, and I put it in your drink, I just dip it into your drink
23:02 Speaker 01 and I remove it, that's not going to make you feel that much better about the cockroach. Now, you might think, well, do I trust Pizarro? Do I trust Rosin to have sterilized this? But even in more extreme cases, so if I have a piece of string... That you know is clean. And that's touching your drink. And the other end of that string, maybe five feet down the line, it's touching some dog feces. People still, many people are reluctant to take a sip from their drink, knowing full well that the germs from the dog feces haven't even had time to travel to their drink. So that's why I think Rosin refers to this as magical,
23:47 Speaker 01 why he's bringing the term sympathetic magic into this.
23:57 Shankar Vedantam? I remember visiting the Exploratorium in San Francisco many years ago, and they had a wonderful little exhibit where they had a drinking fountain, but the drinking fountain was embedded inside a toilet. And it was clearly marked as a drinking fountain. It had never been used as a toilet. But still, the idea of leaning over the toilet and drinking from this drinking fountain was simply, it was not possible to do.
24:23 Speaker 06 Drinking out of a toilet. Are you supposed to drink this?
24:27 Speaker 06 It feels kind of weird because you're drinking out of a toilet.
24:32 Speaker 01 Yeah, I feel that very strongly. I am somebody, the audience might have guessed, I am somebody who is easily disgusted. And yes, even if I knew rationally, I still would probably refuse to do it. But this is one of the ways that emotions work and why they work so powerfully. If it were the case that some of our emotional responses could so easily be overridden by our beliefs, then they might not have the same effect, right? Part of the reason that they work so well is that they can bypass our rational faculties. I don't have to think, for instance, whether a bear poses a real threat. If it's running toward me, I'm running away.
25:18 Shankar Vedantam? So there seems to be a connection between the mind and the body when it comes to disgust. And you say the logic of disgust can spill into our social and moral thinking, too. So if a morally impure person comes into contact with something sacred, the thing that is pure is now seen as tarnished or defiled.
25:37 Speaker 01 There are a couple of ways in which disgust seems to infuse itself into our social life. And one way is that if we describe or feel or say that something is disgusting or show it as disgusting, then it can have real social consequences, as with my friend in the fifth grade. So there, the low-level visceral disgust actually caused me to have this more complex judgment and behavior of ostracizing, of not including him in things.
26:10 Shankar Vedantam? Yeah.
26:11 Speaker 01 And then there's this other way that perhaps is a bit more metaphorical, which is that we like to divide the world into clean and dirty. And the metaphor of good things being pure, being clean, is such that we feel that they can be tainted. So when something evil, when something bad, when something morally disgusting taints those good things, it plays a very similar role as the cockroach in your soup.
26:51 Shankar Vedantam? I mean, this is when you think about a phrase like cleanliness is next to godliness. In some ways, that's the same idea here.
26:58 Speaker 01 That's right. That's right. There is a biological necessity for us to keep our bodies fairly clean. You know, disease was one of the biggest threats to our lives throughout human history. So it's no wonder that not only evolution would give us all of these mechanisms to avoid getting sick, like an immune system and an emotion like disgust, but that cultures would emphasize the importance of cleanliness and that we would use metaphors like cleanliness to start meaning things like keeping your spirit or your soul clean.
27:44 Shankar Vedantam? I understand that you grew up in a religious environment. Did you hear language like this growing up?
27:50 Speaker 01 I did. I think I had a double dose of this because I grew up in a very conservative Christian household. And so, concepts of purity were important and ingrained in us. But I think I also happened to grow up in a household where disgust as an emotion was a very common emotion. I would characterize my family as being very disgust sensitive, as some researchers call it. That is, simply, they find the emotion of disgust to be a very easy one to have. And so, in my household, if you did something dirty, you were not only chided for it, but
28:29 Speaker 01 that face that you described earlier, that wrinkled nose, that look of disgusted disapproval was a common one to receive.
28:40 Shankar Vedantam? You've studied the relationship between disgust and homophobia. Tell me what the connection is here, David.
28:47 Speaker 01 Yeah, there's an interesting feature about disgust, which is that it is very easily tied to sex and sexuality. Now, this shouldn't be so surprising. Sex and sexuality and acts involved in sexual reproduction are quite risky, right? They involve bodies, they involve fluids. These are the kinds of things that we can become easily disgusted by because they're dangerous. So, the domain of sexuality is one of the domains in which disgust seems to be extra powerful. In early research, when we were studying individual differences in disgust sensitivity,
29:28 Speaker 01 and so, in how easily people got disgusted, what we found was that people who reported being easily disgusted in a number of different ways, so take all the examples that we've used so far, and imagine that I gave you a scale. I asked you, how disgusted would you be in this example or in this example? And I give you a score. Some people score very high, and some people would score very low, most of us would be somewhere in the middle. Well, it turns out that the people who are more easily disgusted seem to have more anti-gay attitudes. That is, they're more homophobic.
30:06 Shankar Vedantam? Why would same-sex relationships historically trigger more disgust than opposite-sex relationships? At a fundamental level, they all involve biology and body parts and swapping fluids, as you said.
30:20 Speaker 01 Yeah, and Chakra, I think you're on to something important, that they probably would, all of those sexual acts and relationships, at some level, could easily trigger disgust in us. If I were to just give you an example of any two people you didn't know having sex, you might feel disgust. I think the interesting thing about its role in homophobia, or in anti-gay rhetoric, is that because most people are not gay, it is very easy to have that emotion elicited because you can think of that as not the kind of sex that I would have.
31:04 Shankar Vedantam? So in some ways, I think we can start to see why disgust would be such a potent force in politics and public life. It acts on us at a subterranean level. It shapes what we think is right and wrong. I mean, you can see why it would be powerful.
31:18 Speaker 01 Yeah, and putting some of these things together, we can start seeing, in fact, why people would use it to great effect. So, one, it seems as if this is an emotion that is universal, that everybody has. Two, it works through this process of contagion and contamination, and it's very easy to elicit. So one of the very easy things that we can do is, say I want to convince you that a particular group of people, or a particular individual, or maybe even a certain act, is wrong, that you should avoid it, that you should dislike it. I can point out something that I think is disgusting about it. Maybe I can even invent it, right?
32:02 Speaker 01 Like the Haitian immigrants eating cats and dogs. Now, through the process of contagion, of contamination, I've linked a disgusting idea to a group of people, or to a person. And because of that, it becomes like a very powerful tool in social-political rhetoric to get us to dislike, or disfavor, or disrespect others.
32:36 Shankar Vedantam? And again, when you think about the story about the Haitian immigrants, debunking the story can debunk it at the level of factual information. So I can tell myself, I don't really believe that story is true. I don't think it actually happened. But there's a part of me that is still recoiling at the idea of people eating dogs and cats. And in some ways, my rational thought process is not able to obliterate that emotional reaction.
33:01 Speaker 01 That's right. You can't just undo the influence of emotions. If you could, it would be very nice to just tell people, oh, actually, ignore that thing that you just felt. And if we could do that, I think our lives would be very different.
33:25 Shankar Vedantam? I understand that researchers have looked at how disgust shapes outcomes in the criminal justice system. When a crime is particularly disgusting, it can change the way we think about the criminal.
33:39 Speaker 01 Yeah, and this is one of the areas where there is just direct concern about biasing. So it may be that we want to defend our opinions about whether or not somebody should be engaged in some disgusting acts. But in a criminal system where, imagine that there is a defendant who you do not know if they are guilty or not guilty. And now I'm asking you to make that judgment. Is this person guilty or not? And I show you or describe to you a fairly disgusting criminal act. Turns out that that disgust tends to bias people in favor of finding somebody guilty.
34:21 Shankar Vedantam? In other words, the fact that the details of the crime were disgusting predisposes me to think that the person being accused of the crime probably is guilty.
34:30 Speaker 01 That's right. There have been studies done just like this where, for instance, they will show, these are in mock jury studies where a common methodology used to study the psychology and the law. You bring people in and you present, you make it as if they were jurors in a trial. And some of the people are given images that are in black and white of, say, a grisly crime scene, a murder scene. And some people are given those same images. In other words, the information is all the same, the same crime scene, but some people receive it in very vivid color. Those color images are
35:11 Speaker 01 much more disgusting to look at. And it turns out that just manipulating whether or not they see the images in color or in black and white increases their disgust. And this leads them to be more likely to find the defendant guilty. And in civil cases, more likely to actually give more damages. And if that's not an irrational effect of disgust, I don't quite know what is.
35:44 Shankar Vedantam? When we come back, the politics of disgust, how it's being used to influence you and what you can do about it. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.
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37:11 Shankar Vedantam? This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Listen to any political debate, and certain words seem to repeat themselves: deplorable, disgusting, sickening. These aren't just insults. They point to something deeper. They point to the powerful psychology of disgust. Disgust is not only about rotten food, bad smells, and festering wounds. It plays a role in how we think about our values. It shapes whom we trust, whom we fear, and what we think is wrong. If you have a personal story about disgust and how it has shaped your life, or a follow-up
37:53 Shankar Vedantam? question or comment about today's episode, please find a very quiet room and record a voice memo on your phone. Two or three minutes is plenty. Then, email the file to us at [email protected] . Use the subject line "Disgust." At Cornell University, psychologist David Pizarro studies the intersection of disgust and ethics. He explores how our sensitivity to disgust influences our moral judgments and how that can be manipulated to shape our political views.
38:33 Shankar Vedantam? David, you say that there's a long history of disgust being used to promote political propaganda. Tell me how it was used in the run up to World War II and during the Holocaust?
38:44 Speaker 01 Yeah, so it may come as no surprise to some of our listeners that disgusting imagery was used by the Nazi party to make people feel a certain way about Jews, among other social groups. But it was a very common and powerful tactic to depict verbally or artistically depict a stereotypical Jew as dirty or filthy or greasy or slimy. And this was used to great effect. But it's language and imagery that predates Nazi Germany as well.
39:26 Speaker 01 So the philosopher Martha Nussbaum has pointed out that throughout lots and lots of recorded history, various groups, including women, gay people, Jews, are described as being disgusting in some way, as having some foulness or decay or smell, something to put us off. And that this is as a rhetorical strategy, one that seems to work quite well.
39:55 Shankar Vedantam? And of course, as we've seen, disgust in some ways can prompt us to want to get some distance between us and the disgusting thing. But when you're applying disgust now to social groups, to individuals, to communities, that can also lead to ostracism, it can lead to prejudice.
40:11 Speaker 01 That's right. And here, I think it's useful to compare and contrast two emotions, one of anger and one of disgust. Now, both of those can be used to great effect politically, right? If I'm angry at a group, I might engage and harm them, hurt them. But they're quite different in that one of them, as you just said, disgust motivates avoidance. So if I'm presented with something gross, I don't want to think about it. I want to avoid it. I don't want to see it. Anger, on the other hand, is what psychologists often refer to as an approach emotion. Anger makes you want to engage with the target.
40:53 Speaker 01 Anger makes you want to do something in order to change what the state of affairs, to get revenge, for instance, or to find justice. Whereas disgust can lead you just to turn a blind eye.
41:17 Shankar Vedantam? So if disgust shapes our judgments of others, it's easy to see how this can be a very potent political weapon. Can you predict people's political leanings, David, based on their sensitivity to disgust?
41:31 Speaker 01 We can. In fact, this is one of the first findings that we had that got us interested in studying disgust and social judgment in general. We were studying this individual difference in disgust sensitivity. And one of the things that we kept finding was, in the standard list of demographic questions that we usually included in such studies, we would always have questions about political orientation. And what we found over and over again was that the more easily disgusted somebody said they were, the more likely they were to report being politically conservative. Now, I could say that just as easily the other way around. That is, the less easily disgusted someone is, the more likely they are to say that
42:15 Speaker 01 they're politically liberal, right? Because both of those things are true, and I don't want to imply that one is the correct relationship and one is not.
42:32 Shankar Vedantam? I'm wondering, is it possible that this is related or sits alongside the finding that people's sense of threat perception also shapes their political views? And again, you can argue that it's good to have a high sense of threat perception. You can argue it's good to have a low sense of threat perception. But there have been studies that have indicated that people who are more easily threatened, who feel a greater sense of fear, are also more likely to be conservative. And people who have a lower sense of threat perception tend to be on the more liberal end of the spectrum.
43:06 Speaker 01 I think that's exactly right, and I think that's the right way to think about it. When you look at the research on this relationship between disgust and political orientation, you might ask, well, what aspects of political orientation specifically does this disgust predict well? And what it looks like it's most associated with is what we might call traditionalism, right? The view that the old ways are the good ways and that we should avoid anything too new and too fancy because status quo has gotten us to where we are. So let's not abandon that.
43:47 Speaker 01 And it seems as if that is very, conceptually, if not psychologically, related to this general aversion to threat. Because after all, novel things are potential threats.
44:00 Shankar Vedantam? And again, this is not necessarily, as you point out, making a value judgment about things, because in fact, novel things can be wonderful. They can lead you to new pastures or new opportunities, but they can also lead you to danger and to threat.
44:13 Speaker 01 Absolutely. And I think just a moment's reflection shows that both of those orientations, that of pursuing the novel and that of being wary of the novel, are very important to have. And whether one of them will be successful is completely dependent upon what environment you happen to be in.
44:42 Shankar Vedantam? You've actually tested the effectiveness of disgust as a tool in persuasion. And in one study, you were able to manipulate people's views by changing the smell in a room?
44:53 Speaker 01 Yes, that's right. So one of the most powerful, easy ways of inducing disgust is through the use of a smell. A smell is nice because I don't have to tell people a story. I can show images, but those images usually contain some information. But a smell is a powerful, direct path to feeling disgust often. And what we found was that when we gave people a set of questionnaires that included among them questions about how individuals felt about various social groups, including gay men and lesbian women. When those individuals were completing those questionnaires in a room that smelled
45:38 Speaker 01 bad, they were more negative in their evaluations of those social groups.
45:44 Shankar Vedantam? You ran another study where you reminded people about the importance of physical cleanliness. What was the effect of doing this?
45:52 Speaker 01 This study, I think, shows the principle of what we've been talking about well. Because in this study that you just referred to, we reminded people that they should wash their hands to keep clean. Now, this wasn't a manipulation of disgust, right? These other things that I've been talking about, like a foul odor, or measuring people's tendency to experience disgust, those are clearly disgust. But we were interested in this broader theory about what disgust might be doing, that it might be increasing your feelings of threat about disease, about pathogens, that that specific kind of threat in the world around you.
46:36 Speaker 01 And one way we thought you might also get this is by reminding people that there's disease in the world. And so this was a study where we told people, hey, this was a time many years ago before COVID, when the swine flu was was the thing that people were afraid of. So simply reminding people to wash their hands seemed to make them actually, at least temporarily, ramp up how conservative politically they reported being.
47:03 Shankar Vedantam? Let's talk about how this plays out in the actual world of politics. We've seen some examples of how disgust can be used in propaganda. But I'm curious, do you see disgust at work in current political debates around the world, David?
47:18 Speaker 01 It's hard not to. I mean, so maybe part of the problem is that whenever somebody makes a remark about the disgustingness of somebody else in a political context, it gets sent to me. But I seem to hear it a lot, right? I seem to hear, I think our current president is quite fond of the disgusting imagery, and I think he's quite savvy in this way. But whenever there is a discussion of out-groups, whenever there is a discussion of, say, immigration, I find that there's often this language that appeals.
47:56 Speaker 01 To both the threat, the physical fear that people might have, but also to the, to perhaps this threat is also from the fact that they're kind of gross.
48:09 Shankar Vedantam? In 2015, the conservative journalist Megyn Kelly moderated one of the presidential debates between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Donald Trump didn't like the questions the moderator was asking. Here's how he later described Megyn Kelly.
48:25 Speaker 03 She gets out and she starts asking me all sorts of ridiculous questions. And, you know, you could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.
48:36 Shankar Vedantam? Now, it's possible that Donald Trump was merely misspeaking, David, but he didn't stop to revise or correct that remark. And some commentators took it to be a reference to menstruation and an attempt in some ways to paint his interlocutor as disgusting.
48:52 Speaker 01 Yeah, if it was, if he misspoke, I think it was clear that he sort of doubled down on it. Because I read it in, in the same way. And again, I'll just point back to the philosopher Martha Nussbaum, who was one, one of the first people I read to point out that the emotion of disgust has been associated with various groups, but women in particular. And menstruation, especially for men, is something that it's not difficult to elicit disgust. You can find, you can find countless examples dating back to the
49:32 Speaker 01 earliest written word of how women are treated while they are menstruating. And so this, this was in some ways unfortunately low hanging fruit for somebody like Donald Trump.
49:54 Shankar Vedantam? So stay with this idea for just a second more. We discuss this a little bit in the context of same-sex relationships because, of course, opposite-sex relationships often have some of the same biological characteristics as same-sex relationships. And the same is true for men and women. I mean, men have bodies, they have biologies. You could argue some things that men do or that happen to men can be disgusting. Why is it that menstruation has come to be seen as disgusting in a way that many male bodily functions have not?
50:24 Speaker 01 Well, there, you're asking a very important question. And I believe that I'm probably not the most qualified to speak on this, but what I can say is that any of this discussion will always be colored by the society, the power structures that we currently inhabit. And the fact that men might be the ones in power to specifically describe the bodily functions of women and make us feel disgust, targeting other men as the audience, probably has something to do with it.
51:04 Shankar Vedantam? It is striking, though, the point that you're making, David, which is if we look down history, the Nazis found the Jews disgusting. Upper caste people in India can find lower caste people disgusting. Men can find women disgusting. And it's no accident that it's the group that's often in the majority or the group that's in power that ascribes aspects of disgust to the group that's in the minority or the group that doesn't have power.
51:28 Speaker 01 That's right, Shankar. And as you point out, even in talking about, say, the caste system, but throughout various parts of the world, the people who might be lower in power are usually the ones who have to do the more disgusting jobs. So you're getting sort of a doubling of the effect.
51:59 Shankar Vedantam? One thing that jumps out at me, David, is that when someone accuses you of being disgusting, it's almost impossible to respond to that. I mean, you can respond to an accusation about malfeasance, or corruption, or incompetence, and you can point to evidence that basically says, no, no, no, that's not, that's not true. But disgust has this way of, in some ways, persuading people so powerfully that you can't really mount an argument against it, because as we've just seen, the argument in some ways is, is sort of helpless in the face of the emotion.
52:31 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's a very good point. And I think part of it has to do with this power of negativity that you referred to in Rosin's work, where, you know, how, how, how much soup can you pour on a cockroach to make the cockroach clean? It's not going to happen. Part of it is that some of these things just are true. We are all disgusting. We are, we are all bodies. We're all tainted by the fact that we are humans in these bodies. And so there's very little we can do to argue our way out of that. And it really does seem like because it bypasses our rational faculties often, there's nothing
53:15 Speaker 01 our rational faculties can really do to undo it. If you, if somebody said something gross about me, you may never be able to shake that thought from your head when you meet with me. And so the best we can do is perhaps try to just be, be aware that this might happen.
53:39 Shankar Vedantam? When we come back, when we should push back against our feelings of disgust, and how to do that. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.
54:00 Shankar Vedantam? Support for Hidden Brain comes from US Bank. With a US Bank Smartly Visa Signature Card, you earn an unlimited 2% cash back on every purchase. No quarterly activations, no categories to track, just unlimited 2% cash back on every purchase. Visit usbank.com/smartlycard to learn more. The creditor and issuer of this card is US Bank National Association, pursuant to a license from Visa USA, Inc. Some restrictions may apply.
54:32 Speaker 07 Hey there, I'm Kat. I'm a college athlete. I was diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis, which caused back pain and stiffness every day. With Cosentyx, I'm able to stay active.
54:44 Speaker 01 Cosentyx secukinumab is prescribed for adults with active psoriatic arthritis, ankylosing spondylitis, or non-radiographic axial spondyloarthritis. Available in both IV infusion and self-injection. Don't use if allergic to Cosentyx. Get checked for TB before starting. Increased risk of infections and lowered ability to fight them may occur, like TB or other serious bacterial, fungal, or viral infections. Some are fatal. Tell your doctor if you have an infection or symptoms like fevers, sweats, chills, muscle aches, or cough, had a vaccine or plan to, or if IBD symptoms develop or worsen. Serious allergic reactions and severe eczema-like skin reactions may occur. Learn more at 1-844-COSENTIX or cosentyx.com.
55:25 Speaker 07 Move and feel better. Ask a rheumatologist about Cosentyx.
55:34 Shankar Vedantam? This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Disgust is thought to be an emotion that evolved to protect us from harm. But like all emotions, it can be just as misleading as it is helpful.
55:48 Shankar Vedantam? At Cornell University, psychologist David Pizarro explores how disgust can cloud our judgment and how other emotions can sometimes override its influence.
56:02 Shankar Vedantam? David, when it comes to the deployment of disgust in politics and public life, how should we deal with it? Are there ways that we can inoculate ourselves against disgust? Should we be doing that?
56:15 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's a tricky question, but I think a very, a very important one. So some have argued that we should listen to our disgust response more. So the bioethicist Leon Cass famously argued that there was wisdom in repugnance. And he believed that, that we should pay attention because this emotion was informative. It was telling us something that might be wrong. If I'm grossed out by the thing that you do, maybe it is wrong that you do that thing. Others, like Martha Nussbaum, have said, no, this in fact is quite a dangerous way of thinking about things because you could pretty much argue that anybody or anything is wrong
56:59 Speaker 01 or bad by pointing out something disgusting. I do think personally that one of the things that has brought value to me in studying this, this topic is that, at the very least, if I am being influenced by disgust to believe that a certain thing or person is wrong, I want to be a bit more reflective about it. Because, I'll give you an example. So I have a friend who's a philosopher who has said to me, well, what about somebody who, who engages in the sexual abuse of young children? That's a disgusting thing.
57:43 Speaker 01 Are you telling me that I should, for some reason, turn off my disgust? Shouldn't I amplify it? Shouldn't this motivate me to, to bring that person to justice?
57:55 Speaker 01 To which I guess my response would be, if disgust is the only thing making you want to bring this person to justice, then I'm not sure you're doing it the right way. I think that there are other grounds for finding fault in people. Let's get back to the jurors. I think that there are facts of the matter that should lead you to decide whether somebody is guilty or not of committing a crime. And that the disgust probably shouldn't play a role in that judgment. And so, so I think there's other information that's more relevant when we're making judgments that are so critical to our social lives. Some of this has to do with how we're going to vote on whether
58:41 Speaker 01 men can marry other men, right? We don't want to just be guided by whatever repulsion we might have when thinking about sexual acts.
58:56 Shankar Vedantam? I'm wondering how your own views have evolved when it comes to questions of disgust in public policy, David?
59:02 Speaker 01 You know, as somebody who was raised quite religious and unfortunately in a, in a community that was quite homophobic.
59:12 Speaker 01 As a younger man, and I, I'm embarrassed to admit this, but I think it's important to admit, I was quite homophobic. I believed that men shouldn't marry men. And I also believed that it was disgusting that they did. And over time, my views changed. But I'll tell you, the views, the, the moral views, my reasoned views evolved before my emotions did. And
59:45 Speaker 01 I just, you know, I don't know how else to say it other than I just became convinced for other reasons that some things were right or wrong. And I'm sort of repulsed by my previous views on this matter. But I do know that for a long time, I still let disgust influence my judgments at an individual level to a greater degree than I wanted. So if I had to map out my own trajectory, it doesn't, not to make it seem like I've moved from this intuitive moral monster driven by disgust to this perfectly rational being.
1:00:26 Shankar Vedantam? Right.
1:00:26 Speaker 01 I hope that, I hope it doesn't come across that way. But what I have tried to do is to find ways to arrive at my moral views that, that I can count on as being reliable, as being ones that can convince others, as being ones that at least somebody can defend themselves from. Unlike what you were saying about if somebody labels you gross, what are you going to do? What can you say to that?
1:01:09 Shankar Vedantam? And in some ways, it might actually be really important for us to police, you know, our own views or things that feel intuitively right to us. So if you're a liberal, for example, you might be horrified when Donald Trump says that, you know, immigrants in Ohio are eating dogs and cats. And you, you think this is very unfair. But you might have, you know, a little chuckle when you see, you know, the balloon featuring Diaper Dawn, you know, and, and showing Donald Trump in a diaper. And again, what that really shows is that many of us are perfectly willing to, you know, be two-faced about this, that we are upset about the deployment of disgust when it harms our interests, but we're perfectly willing to do it if it advances our goals.
1:01:53 Speaker 01 Absolutely, and I'm glad that you're saying this because I think that it is quite easy to fall into the trap of, as a, personally as a liberal, of thinking that, oh, I am beyond this, but I see conservatives doing it all the time. That's just untrue, right? So it should not matter whether or not the president is wearing diapers or whatever, right? The personal biological functions of the president should not matter when it comes to me judging his policies. And I, it's unfortunate, but it is very easy to fall into this sort of double standard and this hypocrisy.
1:02:43 Shankar Vedantam? One of the interesting findings that you and others have noticed is that love and lust can eliminate or ameliorate feelings of disgust. How so, David?
1:02:55 Speaker 01 This is one of the more fascinating things about disgust. So because disgust is about bodies and bodies are dangerous things with various fluids emanating from them that might make you sick, it's very easy to feel disgusted at other human beings. But there are a few things that we have to do as a species. One, we have to take care of our young, right? And that involves, as any parent knows, or as any older sibling might know, changing diapers. And it turns out that changing diapers is much easier when it's your child
1:03:34 Speaker 01 than when it's somebody else's, even though the contents of that diaper might be identical. And so there is something about, about love that seems to turn off that disgust. And I think it wouldn't work if it weren't like that. And not just for our children, but for anybody we live with, whom we love. That feeling of disgust just has to temporarily get set aside when we're dealing with them. And lust is a similar thing, right?
1:04:06 Speaker 01 Honestly, Shankar, if we had to think about what sex involved, we would probably be disgusted quite a lot and never engage in it. And that would be, that would not be good for our species. So what other researchers have shown is sexual arousal can temporarily mute the effects of disgust. So if you actually get people sexually aroused, they're less likely to be grossed out by something, even if that thing has nothing to do with the sex. By the same token, though, if they're disgusted first, they're less likely to be able to become sexually aroused.
1:04:48 Shankar Vedantam? I'm wondering how thinking so much about disgust affects you personally, David. When you come home at the end of the day after inventing all kinds of new studies about disgust, are you still able to keep your dinner down?
1:05:01 Speaker 01 I genuinely have to not think about this stuff. I really do. And it is not difficult to make me lose my appetite. One of the reasons I believe that I started studying disgust to begin with was, of all the emotions, it seems like it's a pretty easy one to elicit in others. So it's kind of hard to make people sad or angry. You have to come up with some pretty, pretty in-depth manipulations to make people feel these emotions. For a lot of people, one picture or even one word is enough to make them disgusted. And I'm from that ilk. I, I, I think that intuitively, I must have thought, "The world is like me, so I will
1:05:45 Speaker 01 very easily disgust people." The downside is, to give you a concrete example, for many of the studies that I ran with my collaborator, longtime collaborator on this, who was a graduate student here at Cornell, Yoel Imbar, for many of the studies that we ran on disgust, he had to pick all of the stimuli. He had to design the studies. I couldn't handle doing it. When I would give talks, I would pick the same two images that were disgusting because I had gotten used to those. So you can habituate, you know, you can get used to a specific image, but I could not get, get rid of my general disgust.
1:06:39 Shankar Vedantam? So you and your wife were recently looking at an online photo album of your daughter, and you noticed something about the photos, David. What was it?
1:06:49 Speaker 01 Well, I hope my daughter never hears this. Well, I had recently gotten a nicer camera, nicer than the phone cameras that I've been used to. And we had been out taking pictures of not just our child, but others. This was a little outing with some friends from school. For context, my daughter is almost three years old. And when I saw pictures of my daughter in the cold with a snot dangling from her nose, my immediate thought was, how cute. What a beautiful young daughter I have. And then I saw, in that same role, I saw pictures
1:07:30 Speaker 01 of another child, who objectively, I will admit, is a very, very beautiful young child. They had snot dripping from their nose, and I wanted to gag. I thought, how could this mother not have wiped this boy's nose before we took the pictures? Talk about, you know, this is a much less politically charged instance of hypocrisy, but is one that I noticed in myself quite strongly.
1:08:14 Shankar Vedantam? Do you have a personal story about disgust? Or do you have a comment or question about this episode? If you'd be willing to share your question or comment or story with the Hidden Brain audience, please find a very quiet room and record a voice memo on your phone. Two or three minutes is plenty. Then email the file to us at [email protected] . Use the subject line, "Disgust."
1:08:43 Shankar Vedantam? When you think of all the yucky, disgusting things you have to do, the thing that might come most easily to mind are the times you had a plumbing disaster in your home. A backed up toilet isn't just a problem, it's a disgusting problem. Little wonder then, that if we had to choose between attending to a plumbing problem and focusing on something beautiful, most of us would prefer the latter. Some time ago, I spoke with Stanford's Hagi Rao about the tension between what he calls poetry and plumbing. He argues that in both our personal and professional lives, many of us ignore the plumbing to focus on the poetry.
1:09:24 Shankar Vedantam? This may make short term sense, but it invariably has long term costs. After we aired a recent episode with Hagi, many of you wrote in with accounts of the metaphorical plumbing challenges you faced. We've asked Hagi to come back to the show to respond to those questions. When we come back, we get out our plungers, metaphorically speaking, and run your questions by Hagi Rao. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.
1:10:06 Speaker 05 Hey, everyone. It's Stavros Halakis, and I'm here to tell you about my podcast, Stavvi's World. Each week, we're joined by great guests like Josh Safdie, Eric Andre, Caleb Heron, and more. It's sort of an interview show, but really, we're just messing around, making each other laugh, and hopefully making you laugh while you're washing the dishes or grocery shopping or on a long drive. Plus, I take listener calls where we have honest conversations about dating, life, and everything in between. Imagine if your therapist was a vulgar degenerate whose office was in a Greek diner. No scripts, no polish, and absolutely no holding back. Listen to Stavvi's World wherever you get your podcasts.
1:10:45 Speaker 07 Hey there. I'm Kat. I'm a college athlete. I was diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis, which caused back pain and stiffness every day. With Cosentyx, I'm able to stay active. Cosentyx secukinumab is prescribed for adults with active psoriatic arthritis.
1:11:01 Speaker 01 Ankylosing spondylitis or non-radiographic axial spondyloarthritis. Available in both IV infusion and self-injection. Don't use if allergic to Cosentyx. Get checked for TB before starting. Increased risk of infections and lowered ability to fight them may occur. Like TB or other serious bacterial, fungal, or viral infections. Some are fatal. Tell your doctor if you have an infection or symptoms like fevers, sweats, chills, muscle aches, or cough. Had a vaccine or plan to, or if IBD symptoms develop or worsen. Serious allergic reactions and severe eczema-like skin reactions may occur. Learn more at 1-844-COSENTIX or cosentyx.com.
1:11:39 Speaker 07 Move and feel better. Ask a rheumatologist about Cosentyx.
1:11:47 Shankar Vedantam? This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.
1:11:51 Shankar Vedantam? Before you move into a new home, you take a tour of the place. You imagine where the furniture will go. You daydream about cozy mornings in the breakfast nook, about kids playing in the living room. You picture parties you'll host with friends, maybe the vegetables you'll grow in the garden.
1:12:10 Shankar Vedantam? What you don't think about? All the chores needed to take care of the house. Dusting the window sills, cleaning mold in the shower, scraping burnt food off the bottom of the oven. And those are the small problems. You'll need to replace the water heater, retile the roof. And perhaps the worst headache? Deal with plumbing disasters hidden deep behind the walls.
1:12:39 Shankar Vedantam? At Stanford University, Hagi Rao argues that what is true of real estate is also true of our lives. If we want to be successful, we need to think less about the fun stuff and more about the plumbing. Hagi Rao recently joined us for an episode titled, "Why Following Your Dreams Isn't Enough." If you missed that conversation, you can find it in this podcast feed. Today, Hagi joins us for our listener-driven segment, "Your Questions Answered." Hagi Rao, welcome back to Hidden Brain. Thank you so very much, Shankar. It's a pleasure. To rejoin the conversation.
1:13:16 Shankar Vedantam? Hagi, in our initial conversation, we talked about a tension that affects many people in organizations, particularly as they're trying to launch a new endeavor. You described this tension as poetry versus plumbing. What do you mean by those terms? This wonderfully evocative metaphor of poetry versus plumbing goes back to my wonderful Stanford colleague and mentor, James March. What it means is, poetry has to do with the domain of vision, aspiration, dreams. Plumbing has to do with the guts of execution, the guts of implementation. So that's the tension. How much do you emphasize vision and desirability?
1:14:00 Shankar Vedantam? How much do you emphasize feasibility and execution? And so, being able to do both and that kind of ambidexterity is so central for any leader.
1:14:13 Shankar Vedantam? In our previous conversation, we discussed several examples of businesses and organizations that fail to pay attention to the plumbing. One that we didn't talk about is the company Theranos. You call it a perfect example of an organization that prioritized poetry over plumbing? Yes. That's a fascinating example, Shankar, because, you know, Theranos certainly had a compelling dream or a compelling vision, so to speak. And the vision was, how do you use one small finger-prick sample to do a galaxy of blood desks? It's a powerful vision.
1:14:51 Shankar Vedantam? Unfortunately, what happened was, while the vision was powerful, it was so seductive. In part, what happened is the founders and the employees fell victim.
1:15:03 Speaker 05 Him to that vision without paying attention to the plumbing.
1:15:07 Shankar Vedantam? Hmm.
1:15:07 Speaker 05 Uh, and here's kind of what I mean, because the premise of Theranos was, can we use how software is developed in software firms in Silicon Valley? Can we use the same development model for a medical device? And you can imagine how difficult that is. You know, when you develop new software, obviously they're going to be bugs and things that you haven't addressed. And you progressively improve them as users begin to use them. You can't do that with an FDA approved device. I mean, that needs to be pretty good before it sort of goes out.
1:15:42 Shankar Vedantam? Hmm.
1:15:42 Speaker 05 So that was like a plumbing kind of tension right there. But the other thing is, this vision, in a sense, led the founders to create the kind of culture of like almost no employee could voice concerns about plumbing. I mean, if you did, you faced a lawsuit, for example.
1:16:00 Shankar Vedantam? Hmm.
1:16:01 Speaker 05 Uh, and, you know, they had a board composed of diplomats and senior people like George Schulz and the others, who were kind of far removed from the world of medical diagnostics. And you can imagine what happened. Employees couldn't blow the whistle despite plumbing failures. And it was kind of fake it till you make it was the kind of ethos that was there. And then the wheels came off and that was when everything kind of got exposed.
1:16:31 Shankar Vedantam? Hmm. And of course, it wasn't just the people within the organization who got taken in by the poetry. The company raised hundreds of millions of dollars. It was valued at one point in the billions. And eventually the, the leaders were found guilty of fraud and, and sentenced to prison.
1:16:47 Speaker 05 Absolutely. And that was the, the, the sad unraveling of all of this, absolutely.
1:16:55 Shankar Vedantam? So Huggy, I think many people have the experience of coming up with a great concept for a business or an organization, but then struggle to make that idea a reality. We heard from a listener named Sarah, who wants to create a nonprofit home where people grappling with loneliness or grief can stay a week or two for free. But she can't seem to get it going. Here she is.
1:17:16 Speaker 06 I have a lot of ideas around how to fund it, how to sustain it. But my biggest hurdle is the actual house. I would use my own home if I could, but that's not realistic.
1:17:31 Speaker 06 I would love to be able to do this in a couple of years when I retire. And so, yeah, that's basically my big question is how do I, how do I go about getting this big idea off the ground?
1:17:43 Shankar Vedantam? So I think many people struggle with questions like this, Hagi. Going from a dream to a blueprint. What would you say to Sarah and to people in similar situations?
1:17:53 Speaker 03 So Sarah, thank you for your question. Your idea is a wonderful idea. It brims with generosity. But after having listened to you, here are my quick reactions, Sarah. It seems to me that part of what you're doing is you're in the deliberation phase and you've got to get to the implementation phase. And psychologists refer to this as crossing the Rubicon, as Caesar crossed the Rubicon in ancient Rome and did all the things that he did subsequently. So what would help you to cross the Rubicon is the key question. And listening to you, it seems to me you're focusing on the house as a constraint.
1:18:36 Speaker 03 What I'm kind of wondering is, might you actually have a prototype of your idea? Because at the moment, it's in your head. Can you develop like a little model or a prototype? And use the prototype to talk to people who can help you, not just the people who can stay there, but the others who can potentially help you execute this vision. And the point of the prototype is it's getting you to cross the Rubicon. It's actually creating conversations about with people and it'll help you refine things. You might realize when you do that, maybe you don't need a house. Maybe you might need something intermediate. So there are all these possibilities. So that's what I'd recommend, Sarah.
1:19:21 Shankar Vedantam? So many listeners wrote in to say that they struggle to identify the problems that might be in their way. Here's a question from a listener named Kendra.
1:19:29 Speaker 07 How can one expedite that process of identifying what is getting in the way of making a vision a reality?
1:19:41 Shankar Vedantam? So in some ways, Hagi, this might be an extension of the previous question. As you're launching a new endeavor, you might be aware that there are plumbing problems that you are not aware of, that there are challenges that you need to surmount. How do you figure out what those challenges are when you're starting out for the first time?
1:19:59 Speaker 03 That's a great question. What I would do is I would actually begin by observing users of the potential product or service that you have in mind. Because once you start observing people using your product, you know what the need is, and then you can actually figure out what to do. Let me give you a quick example, Kendra, in the hope it might help you. At Stanford, one of the things we teach executives is, you know, how do you develop a new product? And one of the things we tell them is, the answer isn't sitting on a chair in a classroom. You got to go out and observe users. So what did we do? Took them to San Francisco Airport.
1:20:44 Speaker 03 We were working with JetBlue. They were, if you will, quote the client. And we asked people to observe interactions at San Francisco Airport. One team quickly observed a distraught young child, copiously crying because the airline had misplaced the pet. This was some other airline, not JetBlue. And they came back with this, and they said, how do we help this person? And very quickly, it became apparent to them, hey, this is an extreme case. We could design a system to reduce the probability of a pet being misplaced to zero, but it would be very, very Expensive. Instead, what they did was, how can we serve customers with pets?
1:21:29 Speaker 03 And what did they do? They actually pitched the idea to the chairman of JetBlue and said, JetBlue ought to have a pet class for customers. And, you know, the chairman of JetBlue said, I understand first and economy. You know, what are the markers of this pet class? And people said, well, all that you need is a channel on the TV screen in front of you. It's a channel called the pet channel. You pay thirty bucks, you can see Sparky in the hold. And you can see temperature and you can see whether there's enough water there. Those are the two things people worry about when they think about pets. And I still recall the JetBlue chairman patting his head and saying, why didn't we think of this?
1:22:13 Speaker 03 So observing users, I think, is the key because what that'll give you are our hypotheses, ideas and so forth.
1:22:25 Shankar Vedantam? Sometimes when we're trying to launch a new project, Huggy, we don't actually have the skills needed to attend to the plumbing. Listener Stanislav called in with a question about the transition from being an employee to an entrepreneur.
1:22:37 Speaker 05 There's a lot of skills that need to be learned that really are prerequisites to having an idea get off the ground. And some of the ones that are really undervalued or maybe under discussed is just how long it takes to build your network. You need to have people who have experience in this, people who can help you. And then the other major skill would be to learn marketing. And that's a whole industry and a whole skill set that needs to be learned before any new business, any new venture, any new idea has a chance to really flourish. And these things take an extremely long amount of time and effort to accomplish.
1:23:22 Speaker 05 And a lot of times I feel like it's these exact issues that that kill early entrepreneurs in the beginning, simply because they don't plan for them. They're focused on the product and they're still believing this outdated axiom of if you build it, they will come, which is, you know, simply insufficient.
1:23:40 Shankar Vedantam? So Stanislav's comment makes me think of the idea that we often don't know what we don't know, Huggy. How does one address this sort of problem in the context of launching a new company or getting an idea off the ground?
1:23:50 Speaker 03 I think in many ways, part of what Stanislav is talking about is going from a job to becoming an entrepreneur requires momentum and requires expertise, requires networks and requires knowledge. And all of those things, of course, make a lot of sense. Having said that, my own experience of people making this journey is most entrepreneurial ventures, they begin as side projects by people doing a real job. You know, either the real job is uninteresting, or alternatively, the real job that they're
1:24:32 Speaker 03 currently doing has surfaced the problem that the company they're working with is uninteresting. And then, you know, part of what you do is take it forward. So being in a company always already gives you access to some people, if not the, you know, all of the people you require in a network. Let me give you an example of a student of ours who actually went through that experience. He was a very smart student with a biotechnology background. And, you know, we encourage students at Stanford not just to take courses in the business school, but to hang out in other parts of the university. Well, this guy went and hung out in the medical school. And soon after, he actually persuaded a medical school student to actually drop out
1:25:15 Speaker 03 of medical school and join him in a venture. And what's the venture they came up with? Super simple idea. Ogmedics. You go to a doctor, and what does the doctor do if you have a half an hour meeting? They're spending 15 minutes updating data. They have their back turned towards the patient, in other words. What does Ogmedics do? Ogmedics frees the doctor from this tyranny of record updating. You instead can have a conversation with the patient, and provided the patient gives consent, there's actually a scribe in Bangalore who's actually paying attention to the notes that are being developed and often prompts
1:25:55 Speaker 03 The physician, oh, um, the patient said this, but the patient's grandfather had a similar malady. It's very hard for a doctor to summon all of this knowledge in the course of a conversation with the patient. And very quickly, they were able to show hospitals and healthcare organizations that they could actually improve the productivity of doctors by 25%.
1:26:20 Speaker 07 Hmm.
1:26:21 Speaker 03 And what happens now? Othmedics is there virtually in most hospitals, most things, but how did the guy develop it? He found an opportunity, observed something that in retrospect is obvious, but nobody paid attention to it. What he did was he solved an orphan problem. Doctors complained, hey, we're wasting our time updating. Patients said, what is happening? Why isn't the doctor spending more time with me? Even though people complained, nobody did anything until this guy went and did it. Of course, with his co-founder, who was a medical school student. Hopefully, this gives you an idea.
1:27:00 Speaker 03 The key is not all the resources you need, but the key is observing the orphan problem that you need to address.
1:27:17 Shankar Vedantam? When we come back, how the metaphor of poetry and plumbing applies to contexts outside of work. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.
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1:29:45 Shankar Vedantam? This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. When you're starting a project, it's easy to get lost in the romance of it. You have a brilliant idea. You cannot wait to make it happen. But soon, you have to do the hard work of transforming that idea into reality. At Stanford University, Hagee Rao says many would-be entrepreneurs and leaders often focus on the poetry of their ideas. They neglect the plumbing, the messy and sometimes dirty mechanics of putting those ideas into practice.
1:30:21 Shankar Vedantam? Hagi, I'd like to start by acknowledging that one reason many organizations ignore the plumbing is because it can sometimes be boring. Someone needs to fill out the spreadsheets. Someone has to do the bookkeeping. Someone has to make sure the money owed to a company actually gets paid. Lots of these are not glamorous jobs. They involve repetition and attention to detail. But if the jobs are not done, everything goes kaput. Can you talk a moment about the role of boredom, Hagi, in pushing us towards poetry over plumbing?
1:30:51 Speaker 03 That's a truly beautiful question. The first thing is, as you very rightly point out, plumbing is devalued in organizations. Good plumbers are actually people who help the organization to avoid problems, to prevent them in the first place. So the problem is their contribution is not visible. In contrast to somebody who's dealing with a crisis and rallying people and doing all of these kinds of things. Now, plumbing doesn't just mean the attention to detail. Plumbers also are the best coordinators. And interestingly enough, people who are plumbers,
1:31:34 Speaker 03 when they do this kind of integrative work, particularly when the coordination is done by women, it's actually derisively characterized as, sort of, if you will, office housework. And, you know, the important thing to keep about plumbing is, while plumbing may be boring to others, it's not necessarily boring to the plumber. So that's the challenge for plumbers.
1:32:02 Shankar Vedantam? We heard from one plumber at an organization who feels like her contributions are not valued, exactly as you were describing. Listener Amanda says she's been with the same company for 12 years and worked her way up to the position of vice president. But recently, her boss reassigned her.
1:32:21 Speaker 03 He limited most of what mattered to me about the job. To him, he just changed my job description. And to me, he fired me. You know, I'm not as motivated by the idea of doing something great. But I am incredibly motivated by making someone's life easier. And it's difficult for me to focus on greatness and not focus on things like scaling it, or ease of use, or whatever, like, who's having a hard time because of this?
1:33:03 Speaker 03 And I do wonder if organizations don't value plumbing, if they just have to fail. I guess that's what I wonder.
1:33:14 Shankar Vedantam? So, Haki, there's a lot here. You can hear the pain in Amanda's voice. Of course, we don't know all the details of what's happening. We don't know the interpersonal dynamics involved. But it seems like, in this case, it's Amanda who cares about the plumbing. How would you advise both leaders and followers to negotiate what needs to get done?
1:33:33 Speaker 03 I was actually very touched by Amanda's question and the sense of loss that suffuses the question. Having said that, here were some thoughts that crossed my mind, and my hope is they might actually help you and others who are in a similar situation such as yours. The way I heard you, Amanda, was, hey, you had a footprint, and you had a job, if you will, that was kind of associated with the footprint, and what your boss did was he reassigned you. And listening to you, you clearly and very understandably experienced this as loss
1:34:16 Speaker 03 and, you know, something that diminishes you, so to speak. In any organization, when a job change comes across as a surprise, to my mind, it is a failure of leadership. You ought not to have been surprised at all, but if it came to you as a surprise, I think clearly there could have been lots of things that could have been done better, and we can, of course, spend time on it. But what I would suggest that you think about, Amanda, is how this might potentially be freeing for you. Because one of the challenges all of us have to do with jobs is we love to add things to our remit.
1:35:00 Speaker 03 In fact, we think the bigger a job, the better it is. But the corresponding consequences, when we add, we overwhelm ourselves. And not only that, we become thinly spread like peanut butter on a slice of toast. Now, it seems to me you already have a wonderful mission. You know, and the mission is to make life easier for people. You are a friction fixer, Amanda. And that's incredible. And so what you may want to think of doing is this job change doesn't require new skills. You need to activate as it were a new version of yourself.
1:35:45 Speaker 03 So the question you ought to ask yourself is, how do I multiply my curiosity with generosity in the job? Because you want to actually make life easier for people, as you said. And I think the more you summon curiosity and generosity and think of multiplying that, Amanda, you'd be in a better position, as will the people who obviously kind of depend on you for your expertise and your contribution. The other option, of course, for you always is to move to another company. But as you know, the grass sometimes appears greener on the other side. And that's a temptation, an issue that you need to be cognizant about. But thank you so much for your candor and your honesty.
1:36:30 Shankar Vedantam? So Hagi, plumbing and poetry, of course, are metaphors. And I can well imagine both, you know, bosses and employees listening to this segment and each believing that they care about the plumbing, even though they care about very different things. How do organizations, how do leaders and followers resolve this tension, Hagi?
1:36:50 Speaker 03 If we really look at leaders, what the evidence shows is people who are very powerful in organizations, they actually search very little because they have no need to. And so one consequence of that is you can actually have tunnel vision. You may also lack the ability to understand jobs, three to four levels underneath you. And if you don't know what is happening in A job three to four levels underneath you, you don't understand the plumbing issues well. And so you're either likely to ignore them or be derogatory or, you know, what have you. If you want to understand plumbing, be vulnerable.
1:37:33 Speaker 03 It seems to me that part of what we need is we need to get leaders to actually see the organization kind of bottom up. In another lovely example of the gap between leaders and followers being reduced is this lovely idea of reverse mentoring. You know, some leaders in the C suite now have mentors who are young engineers teaching them about AI. And I asked one of them, hey, how come you're doing this? He said, hey, you know, I'd go home, I'd ask my son or daughter about this AI thing. And I didn't have much time and I realized that a lot of people the age of my son or daughter in my company, they can teach me and there you go. And the moment the CEO said, I have a reverse mentor who is a junior engineer.
1:38:18 Speaker 03 What did other people in the C suite do? They also found it easier to say, you know, I really don't know a whole lot about AI. And maybe our younger people can actually help me educate me and get me a little bit up to speed on AI. So all of these ways are ways of like bridging, if you will, the the seeming divide between poetry and plumbing.
1:38:43 Shankar Vedantam? We heard from a listener named Debbie about the risks of burnout for the people who are known as their organization's plumbers. She writes plumbers are turned to all the time at work, at home, in the community, in nonprofit organizations. The plumbers get burned out, they are effective, and so they are counted on to get done what's needed to get done. And plumbers are surrounded by all sorts of people who cannot or will not help with the necessary work. What does it take to develop more plumbers? So I guess there's a two part question here, Huggy. What can we do to help plumbers avoid burnout? And second, how can we develop more of them?
1:39:22 Speaker 03 Great questions, Debbie. I think your first question is spot on. Because what happens in organizations is when they find a person like yourself Debbie, who is a good plumber, what do people do? They rely on you. And of course, the more they rely on you, the more they abdicate their own responsibility to also be plumbers in their roles and in their jobs. And that's part of the reason why, because others abdicate and others expect you to do that, plumbers become overburdened. But there's also another dynamic, and the other dynamic is plumbers also may seek to expand their own remit in order to become more indispensable to the organization, to
1:40:06 Speaker 03 become more powerful and perhaps more valued in the organization. The challenge for a plumber, who becomes actually kind of overburdened, is to actually think of simple ways in which you put time boundaries around yourself. Two studies are relevant here. One study shows that people who are plumbers, they get interrupted often. How come? People come to them for help. So the more you get interrupted, the less work you're able to do and your own productivity diminishes. The other thing is, there are studies that show when people become overburdened with
1:40:48 Speaker 03 requests for help, the specific number can vary, anywhere between 10 to 12 per week to 20 plus per week or whatever. Under those circumstances, what happens is plumbers begin to click on passive job advertisements that cross their way, if you will. So how can we help plumbers in this context? A simple way of time bounding things is to tell people, "Don't interrupt a plumber all the time. They have office hours, they're available Wednesdays 1 to 2, or 12 to 1, or whatever it is. Go ask them your questions and localize their helping time." That's one simple thing you can do. But the other thing, and this is inherent and implicit in your second question, is
1:41:33 Speaker 03 plumbers have to be recruiters. If you're not a recruiter, and if you're not getting other people to join in the adventure of plumbing, it's going to be very, very difficult. And so now to the second question. Question, how do you develop plumbers? My view in organizations is you should start developing plumbers from the moment you onboard new employees. In fact, new employees are the best people for you to find out where the plumbing isn't working. The other day, I was at a chip making company. And you know, people who design chips, they require not one computer screen, but two, because they got to look at lots of things. And I was going into this organization to meet the CEO.
1:42:16 Speaker 03 And I just saw this young engineer whom I hadn't seen before. I noticed he had two screens. And I said, how long did it take you to get the second screen? He looked at me and he said, you work here? I said, no, I'm a professor at Stanford, I'm just visiting. I noticed it, and that's the reason I'm asking you. And he looked at me and he says, professor, it took me two weeks to get the second screen. This place is like a bazaar in Istanbul. You don't know which door you got to knock to get the thing. And you see the plumbing problem right there.
1:42:47 Speaker 03 You see the plumbing problem right there. So I'd start earlier. And the other thing it seems to me is we need to embed plumbing into the performance evaluation process.
1:42:58 Shankar Vedantam? So that the company is monitoring it, taking account of it, and potentially rewarding it?
1:43:03 Speaker 03 Exactly, exactly.
1:43:06 Shankar Vedantam? One thing that struck me in our earlier conversation, Hagi, is that the poetry versus plumbing idea applies to many contexts outside the world of business. We received a voicemail from a listener named Mayira. She's a rabbi, and she connected your ideas to the Jewish tradition. Here she is. I want you to know that God also had his issues with this, which is why when Moses received the first set of tablets on top of Mount Sinai, he came down to the bottom of the mountain to find the people worshiping the golden calf and smashed
1:43:48 Shankar Vedantam? the first set of tablets written by the finger of God, because there wasn't enough planning, apparently before the creation of the human being.
1:44:01 Speaker 03 That was actually a delightful overture, Mayira, taking us back, of course, to Moses and the tablets. And it was wonderfully evocative. I was immediately reminded that, you know, the earliest known poetry actually is the epic of Gilgamesh from Mesopotamia. You know, this was during Sumerian times. And ironically, even though there was the epic of Gilgamesh with all of this poetry, the Sumerians were known for superb plumbing of their cities. Hmm. The sewage, the water, everything was very carefully thought through. But as we kind of think of what happened in Sumeria
1:44:44 Speaker 03 at that point in time, it's the poetry that stands out. We lose sight of the plumbing. And it was the plumbing that actually helped the Sumerian civilization survive as long as it did. Otherwise, you would have diseases and public health pandemics that would have decimated them. So indeed, it goes back a very long time.
1:45:09 Shankar Vedantam? Hagi Rao works at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business with Bob Sutton. He's the author of The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder. Hagi, thank you so much for joining me again today on Hidden Brain.
1:45:24 Speaker 03 A real pleasure, Shankar. Thank you so very, very much.
1:45:35 Shankar Vedantam? Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Christian Wong, Laura Kwerel, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. If you enjoyed today's conversation and find Hidden Brain to be useful or thought provoking, please consider joining Hidden Brain Plus. It's our subscriber-only podcast feed where we bring you ideas and conversations you will not hear anywhere else. You'll also be helping to provide the fuel for the research, writing, fact checking, and sound design that go into every episode of the show. To subscribe, go to support.hiddenbrain.org.
1:46:19 Shankar Vedantam? If you're using an Apple device, you can sign up at apple.co/hiddenbrain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.
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