Stepping Out of the Shadows

Why does one bad experience have the power to overshadow an otherwise good day? Psychologist Alison Ledgerwood explores the negativity bias, the deeply human tendency to hold on to what went wrong and overlook what went right. She explains why our minds are drawn to losses and threats, and what it takes to rebalance our attention. Then, on Your Questions Answered, psychologist David Pizarro returns to respond to your comments about the surprising role of disgust in shaping our lives.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Imagine you're an architect, but instead of drawing up a plan for a skyscraper or a bridge, you've been asked to design the most sophisticated edifice in the universe: the human brain.

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  Getting to work at your drafting table, you'd likely prioritize accuracy. You want this brain to perceive the world exactly as it is: a perfect mirror of reality.

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  In your blueprint, the good and the bad, the rewarding and the threatening, all would be treated the same. Every event, every experience would be assigned equal weight, given the same attention and remembered equally.

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  But as any architect will tell you, there is a vast gulf between a design that works on paper and one that actually survives the elements. The same is true of our own minds.

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  The architect of evolution wasn't interested in making us objective observers or serene philosophers. It wasn't trying to design a brain that took a fair and balanced view of the world. It was building a survival machine.

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  To survive in a world filled with menacing predators, scarce resources, and social traps, the brain had to be designed with a series of built-in biases. Those are the same brains we have inside our heads today. It's why we focus more intently on some flavors of experience rather than others.

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  In turn, these biases shape what we perceive, how we respond, and even the course of our most intimate relationships.

• 1:55Speaker 00

  This week on Hidden Brain, and in a companion story on Hidden Brain+, the lopsided ledgers in our minds, and how we can bring them into balance.

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• 3:58Speaker 00

  Let's say you're a music critic attending a symphony.

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  For two hours, 80 musicians play in perfect, breathtaking harmony.

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  The strings are soaring, the brass is precise, and the conducting is fluid.

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  But in the final minute of the performance, a single violinist hits a flat note. It lasts for less than a second. A tiny discordance in an otherwise flawless evening.

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  When you sit down to write your review, what do you remember? If your brain were a perfect recording device, that one second error would be a mere blip, buried under two hours of beauty. But for a critic, and that means all of us, that one flat note can become the entire story. It lingers in our minds and shapes how we remember the evening. At the University of California, Davis, psychologist Alison Ledgerwood studies how and why this happens. Alison Ledgerwood, welcome to Hidden Brain.

• 5:17Speaker 02

  Thank you so much for having me.

• 5:20Speaker 00

  Allison, a few years ago, you noticed something peculiar about the way you responded to developments in your work life. What did you notice?

• 5:29Speaker 02

  I noticed that I could have a big success or a small success one day. An academic paper gets accepted or I meet a new work colleague who I'm really excited to become friends with. And that would be lovely. But then, the next day or later that day, something negative would happen. A paper would get rejected. Somebody would snap at me in the hallway or not look happy to see me. And I couldn't get that negative out of my head. And this would happen even if the good thing was way more important than the bad thing when I took a step back. The negative seemed to stick with me all day, all week.

• 6:18Speaker 00

  You observed a similar dynamic when reading over your student evaluations. Some forms of feedback stick in your head?

• 6:27Speaker 02

  So I teach these big classes, 200 students, 300 students. And at the end of each quarter, you get teaching evaluations that are passed out by the university and ask some questions about the class and the professor so that you can get feedback on what's going well and what you could do better. And often, I would get a lot of glowing comments. I'm flipping through them and it's like, "This is the best class I've taken so far at UC Davis. And this was one of the best professors I've ever had." And everything seems rosy. And then I would come across a single negative comment. Somebody says, "I could have found all of this online." And I'm devastated.

• 7:11Speaker 02

  I'm counterarguing in my head. I'm thinking about the hours and hours and hours of work I put into pulling together these sources from different places so that the students wouldn't have to just have everything canned from a textbook. And then I start thinking, they don't appreciate this, as if it's the whole class. None of them want to be in this class. They would just rather be finding this information on YouTube. Why am I even here? Instead of contextualizing that as one comment out of the hundreds that I had gotten, right?

• 7:55Speaker 00

  Now, I think many people have experienced what you've experienced, Alison. And of course, it doesn't just happen in work settings. You were driving recently when you noticed the same thing at work.

• 8:05Speaker 02

  Exactly. So a few weeks ago, I had this perfectly lovely day, and I was driving to pick up my kid from school. And I slowed down and stopped for somebody who was jaywalking across the street. And instead of saying thank you, or even just ignoring me, she yelled at me. I think because it actually took her longer to wait and figure out if I was going or not than to just cross the street. But for whatever reason, she yells at me. And it takes me like an hour to stop feeling bad about it and perseverating on it and wondering, should I have done something different? What did I do wrong?

• 8:47Speaker 00

  Let's talk a moment about how this tendency to focus on the negative shows up not just in our personal lives, but also in the way we respond to the news. Between 2001 and 2004, NASA directed the voyage of a space probe called Genesis. It was a truly extraordinary piece of engineering, designed to capture particles ejected from the sun for the very first time, truly an incredible feat of science. What happened on this voyage, Alison, and how do we remember it?

• 9:18Speaker 02

  You know, you could argue that the Genesis space mission was 99% an amazing success. This was the first NASA space probe to go out and collect material beyond the moon's orbit and bring it back to Earth. The mission had three major scientific objectives, and all of them were met. But that's not what the headlines reported at the time, or what many people remember about Genesis. Because at the very end, after all of the successes, because of a tiny mistake in how some sensors were installed, the probe crash-landed in the Utah desert. And that made the whole thing feel like a failure.

• 9:56Speaker 03

  It looks like we have a no shoot, sir. Vector 200. Put it under those eight miles. Look for an impact.

• 10:02Speaker 04

  BC, negative throw, negative shoot. Impact, impact at 5855.

• 10:10Speaker 03

  Impact.

• 10:10Speaker 04

  Impacted vehicle on the surface.

• 10:18Speaker 00

  Now, the probe had traveled something like a billion miles. That's billion with a B. And in fact, much of the scientific information that the probe was sent to collect was in fact, collected. And from a scientific point of view, the mission was a success, but that's not how we remember it.

• 10:35Speaker 02

  Exactly. We focused on that one little thing that went wrong. I mean, crashing is not tiny. Crashing is a big crash. But in terms of, exactly as you said, the scientific objectives of the mission, it was a small blip. The scientists were able to recover the information they needed, and yet, we think of it as a failure.

• 11:02Speaker 00

  Let's talk a moment about how our tendency to harp on the negative can shape even geopolitical conflict and war. Some years ago, Allison, researchers produced an in-depth analysis of how Germany ended up in World War I, not because necessarily it was under threat, but because it believed that it was under threat from its neighbors.

• 11:22Speaker 02

  Right. So if you're a country and you are looking for possible problems, possible threats to address, it makes sense, right, that the possibility of a threat would grab your attention, and it could lead you to make some bad choices because you kind of overestimate the strength of that threat.

• 11:42Speaker 00

  I mean, this was probably true even when it came to something like the Cold War. The United States and the Soviet Union greatly overestimated how belligerent and dangerous the other side was and effectively brought the whole world to the brink of annihilation.

• 11:57Speaker 02

  Right. Each side is focusing on what could go wrong. They're focusing on the possibility of that threat and focusing so much on the possibility of something going wrong without also focusing on the possibility that it could go right, right, that things could de-escalate, leads to this kind of escalating, oh, no, we better be prepared for the worst possible case. And then, oh, no, we'd better be prepared for the worst possible case, and on and on.

• 12:29Speaker 00

  And it's so interesting. I think when we think about geopolitical conflict or the ways that nations interact with each other, I think we often forget that there are human beings who are basically involved in these negotiations. These are human beings who are making judgments. And so in some ways, it ought to be unsurprising that the way our minds think should shape these major, major events.

• 12:50Speaker 02

  I couldn't agree more. And I think you see this in all kinds of settings, right? We think of historical forces as somehow not being biased by human psychology. And in all of these cases, right, we're squishy humans, we're fallible, we have all kinds of biases in our minds that influence how we think and how we make sometimes very consequential decisions.

• 13:17Speaker 00

  The human brain operates like a very curious kind of magnet. It remains indifferent to shavings of silver and gold, but it's drawn to heavy jagged shards of lead and iron.

• 13:29Speaker 00

  When we come back, why our minds are irresistibly drawn to the negative. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 13:50Speaker 00

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• 15:10Speaker 00

  Not available in all states. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. In 1777, the English writer Samuel Johnson was talking with his friend and biographer James Boswell about the case of an Anglican clergyman who had been sentenced to death for forgery. Samuel Johnson remarked to his companion, "Depend on it, sir. When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully." Even when the fate we are facing is far less severe than an execution, bad news tends to concentrate the mind.

• 15:52Speaker 00

  It crowds out the happy aspects of our existence. At the University of California, Davis, psychologist Alison Ledgerwood studies why this happens in the brain. Allison, we've been talking about the effects of what psychologists call the negativity bias. What is this bias?

• 16:11Speaker 02

  Simply put, the negativity bias is the tendency for our brains to look for negative information and then hold on to it once we find it. This shows up in a lot of different ways, and the version that I study is that once we think about something in negative terms, that way of thinking about it tends to stick in our minds and resist subsequent attempts to change it.

• 16:34Speaker 00

  Why would our brains be designed this way, Alison?

• 16:37Speaker 02

  You know, we can tell an evolutionary story. I like to remind myself that we can't go back in time and like experimentally test that this is what happened, but it makes sense from an evolutionary perspective to think that, you know, when you're wandering along the plain in our ancestral past and you encounter a tiger, you really want a brain in that moment that's going to say, "Oh, hey, there's a tiger," and it's not going to forget about the tiger because you happen to glance at a tree and it looks pretty in the afternoon light, right? You want a brain that's going to say, "Tiger, tiger, tiger," and not stop saying tiger for a while after that.

• 17:22Speaker 00

  So in some ways, the idea is that, in our evolutionary past at least, there was survival value in being very focused on negative or threatening information.

• 17:33Speaker 02

  Exactly. You want your mind to focus on potential threats. You also want your mind to focus on mistakes. When we make a mistake, our mind fixates on it. Our body might feel bad, right? Guilty or upset or disappointed. And that's our brain and our body saying, "Hey, that didn't go the way that we wanted it to go. Next time, maybe we could do something different."

• 18:01Speaker 00

  But of course, now that translates into a professor teaching her students getting 199 positive reviews and then getting one negative review and saying, "Oh, my God, let me focus on the negative review, the negative review, the negative review."

• 18:15Speaker 02

  Absolutely. So sometimes the negativity bias in our minds is really functional. It helps us learn from mistakes. It helps us identify problems that we need to fix, often in collaboration with other people. And sometimes it just gets you stuck on something that doesn't seem to have any use, that you would rather not be thinking about.

• 18:40Speaker 00

  Now, the brain's tendency to react more strongly to negative information has been demonstrated even in brain imaging studies. What do these show us, Alison?

• 18:49Speaker 02

  Some of my favorite work on this comes from Tiffany Ito, a psychologist and neuroscientist at the University of Colorado Boulder. And in some of her work, she showed participants a series of pictures that were positive, or negative, or neutral. And she measured event-related brain potentials, or ERPs, which basically just capture how the brain is responding to a stimulus. She found that participants' brains responded more strongly to negative images than to positive images, suggesting that the negative motivational system responds more intensely than the positive motivational system.

• 19:25Speaker 00

  Now, I suppose we can notice our tendency to overweight the negative, and we might wish that our brains didn't do this. But if we could wave a magic wand and make this happen, if we could remove our tendency to focus on the negative, would that be a good thing, Alison?

• 19:42Speaker 02

  I don't think so at all, Shankar. And the reason is because of this function of negativity bias that we talked about earlier. It is useful to pay attention to real threats. It is useful to pay attention to real mistakes that we can learn and grow from and do better next time. And it is useful to pay attention to real problems in our environment, in society, in the situation around us, that we can address by working together with other people.

• 20:17Speaker 00

  So in some ways, it's a dilemma, because we have what is arguably a very useful feature of our minds. But that useful feature also produces a lot of unhappiness, because we are so focused on the negative rather than the positive.

• 20:32Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 20:43Speaker 00

  You've been particularly interested in the idea of framing. Things in the world aren't necessarily inherently positive or negative. We can feel differently about the same person, or object, or event, depending on how it's described. Why is framing so significant, Alison?

• 21:01Speaker 02

  There's tons of research across many different disciplines, political science, psychology, economics, focused on this idea of framing, that the way that we feel about a person, or an event, is going to change depending on how it's described or framed. And at its heart, at the most basic level, this is just that proverbial glass that can be seen as half-full or half-empty. It matters how somebody describes the glass to you. If somebody says, hey, look at this half-full glass, you think, this is great. There's water in there. If somebody says, hey, look at this half-empty glass, you think, oh, no, it's half-empty.

• 21:50Speaker 00

  The psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky once conducted an influential study on the effects of framing. Can you describe the study for me and what it found?

• 22:00Speaker 02

  Kahneman and Tversky conducted early work showing that seemingly trivial changes in wording could produce really striking changes in people's preferences. So in their 1981 research, they told participants, imagine that there's been an outbreak of an unusual disease, and 600 lives are at stake. And then they randomly assigned people in their study to one of two groups. For the first group, they went on to describe some possible response options in terms of how many lives would be saved. If you go in this direction, this many lives would be saved. If you go in this with this response instead, that many lives will be saved. For the second group, they described those same options

• 22:42Speaker 02

  in terms of how many lives would be lost. So, for example, out of 600 lives, you're thinking, in one case, about the 400 that will be saved, or in the other case, the 200 that will be lost.

• 22:57Speaker 00

  What Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky found was that simply framing outcomes in positive or negative terms dramatically altered people's preferences. When choices were framed in terms of lives saved, people tended to avoid risk. When those same choices were framed in terms of lives lost, people became more willing to gamble. I asked Alison to tell me about other work that also looks at how we describe the successes or failures of groups, and how we then come to see those groups.

• 23:29Speaker 02

  So in one of these studies, professionals were asked to evaluate a work team based on some information about that team's past performance. Half of the participants in the study, randomly assigned, were told that 30 out of 50 of the team's past projects had been successful. The other half of the participants were told that 20 out of 50 of the team's past projects had been unsuccessful. So mathematically, it's the same identical information, right? But some participants were focused on the part of the glass that was full, some participants were focused on the part of the glass that was empty. And then the question was, do you fund the work team? Like, how likely are they to succeed?

• 24:13Speaker 02

  And participants wanted to fund the team more when its past performance had been described in terms of successes than when its past performance had been described in terms of failure.

• 24:29Speaker 00

  I understand the same phenomenon is sometimes at work in medical settings when patients are deciding whether to go forward with a surgery. How the surgery is described can change whether we decide it's a good idea or a bad idea.

• 24:43Speaker 02

  Right. So imagine I tell you, a national panel is evaluating a recently developed surgical procedure that involves new robotic technology. And a three-year study on the procedure just concluded. Based on the data, experts agree that it has a survival rate of 70%. Or, I tell you, it has a mortality rate of 30%. Same information, again. But participants in a study like this are much more favorable towards the procedure when it's described in terms of the survival rate than when it's described in terms of the mortality rate.

• 25:21Speaker 00

  Now, on its surface, these framing effects might not seem like they are about the negativity bias. Or at least, they are not about the negativity bias alone. When you tell people the surgical procedure has a 70% survival rate, people do focus on that positive news. But here is how the negativity bias kicks in. Allison has run studies where people are presented either the positive or the negative information. Then, she presents people with the other side of the coin. The people who got the positive framing first now get the negative framing. The people who got the negative framing about the mortality rate of the procedure are now presented the same information with the positive framing, the survival rate.

• 26:05Speaker 02

  In our research, we start out the same way that all these framing studies have in the past. Half the participants see a person, a politician, an event, a surgical procedure framed in positive terms. Half of them see that same thing framed in negative terms. But unlike in past research, we don't stop there. We keep going. So, people in our studies who see, let's say, a surgical procedure framed in terms of its survival rate at time one, then see it reframed in terms of its mortality rate at time two. People who originally see the surgical procedure framed

• 26:46Speaker 02

  in terms of its mortality rate, then later see it reframed in terms of its survival rate. And our question is, can people just follow along with this as the vast literature on framing seemed to suggest? People just react to the frame that's right in front of them? I like the half-full glass. I dislike the half-empty glass. So maybe I can bounce back and forth easily between them.

• 27:12Speaker 02

  But that's not what we found, or it's only what we find half the time. When people see a positive frame first, and then it switches to a negative frame, survival rate switches to mortality rate, they follow right along. They like the procedure at first. When you reframe it, they don't like it anymore. But when we move in the opposite direction, when we start out with negatives and reframe as positives, participants tend to get stuck in the initial negative framing. They don't like the procedure when it's described in terms of mortality. And then when we say, hey, you can think of this in terms of survival rate, they still don't like it.

• 27:56Speaker 00

  So in other words, if you tell me the procedure has a 70% survival rate and I like it, but then you tell me it has a 30% mortality rate, I change my mind and I now stop liking it. But if you start out telling me it has a 30% mortality rate, I don't like it. And now if you tell me it has a 70% survival rate, I still don't like it.

• 28:16Speaker 02

  Yes, that initial negative frame seems to stick in your head and resist subsequent attempts to change it.

• 28:30Speaker 00

  What does this tell you that in some ways, things seem to drift almost toward the negative side of the equation?

• 28:37Speaker 02

  I think that our brains have a tendency to tilt towards the negative, right? That just fundamental negativity bias that our minds look for negative information and then hold on to it once we find it. And I think this is one way that our brains do that, that our brains are holding on to the initial conceptualization of something as negative. And it's really hard to switch things around and start thinking of it as positive.

• 29:19Speaker 00

  When you see these framing effects and you see that we tend to go from a positive frame to a negative frame fairly easily, but not so easily from a negative frame to a positive frame, do you have any understanding of how this is actually happening in the brain, Alison?

• 29:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, so this was a question that we were really curious about, and we've looked at it in a few different ways. But probably my favorite is that we gave people a very simple math problem. We told them, imagine there's been an outbreak of an unusual disease, and 600 lives are at stake. So that classic Kahneman and Tversky framing study. And then we just asked them, if 100 lives are saved, how many will be lost? Or if 100 lives are lost, how many will be saved? So everyone just has to calculate 600 minus 100 and come up with the answer of 500. But whereas some people have to convert from

• 30:13Speaker 02

  positives to negatives to get that answer, the second group, the other people, have to convert from negatives to positives.

• 30:21Speaker 00

  Can you unpack that last part just a little bit more?

• 30:24Speaker 02

  Sure. So some people, to solve the problem of 600 minus 100, have to convert from lives saved to lives lost, right? If 100 lives are saved, how many will be lost? Other people are doing the same math problem, but they're calculating if 100 lives are lost, how many will be saved. And then we timed how long it took them to solve the problem. Everyone can do it in a few seconds, but it takes people significantly longer when the math problem involves converting from negatives to positives than when it involves converting from positives to negatives.

• 31:02Speaker 00

  So it's almost as if you have a, you know, if the brain was a freeway system or a road system, then the negativity information flows on the highways and the positivity information flows on the backstreets.

• 31:15Speaker 02

  I love that analogy, yeah.

• 31:23Speaker 00

  Our minds tend to focus on things that are threatening or distressing. Often, what this means is that we walk around with an excessively negative view of our lives and the world. But there are ways to manage our tendency to focus on the negative, and even ways to turn this bias to our advantage. When we come back, rebalancing bad with good. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Planet Visionaries. Professional climber and environmental advocate Alex Honnold hosts Planet Visionaries, a podcast

• 32:08Speaker 00

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• 33:36Speaker 00

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Can you think of a time in your life when something negative crowded out all the positive things? Did this have consequences for the way you behaved and the opportunities you were able to see? If you have a personal story you would be willing to share 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. Email the file to us at [email protected] using the subject line "negative." Again, that's [email protected]. Alison Ledgerwood is a psychologist at the University of California, Davis.

• 34:20Speaker 00

  She studies the tendency of the brain to focus on the negative and how different frames can change the way we see events in a positive light or a negative light. Now, Alison, as we've discussed, the goal here is not to eliminate our tendency to focus on the negative. There can be real value and benefit in noticing things that are dangerous or threatening or wrong. However, it is the case that the bias that we have toward the negative causes many of us to walk around feeling like our lives are much worse than they actually are. You say one way to combat this problem is to make an effort to notice things about our lives that are positive?

• 34:56Speaker 02

  You know, what I take away from this research for my own life in part is that our brains have this fundamental tendency to tilt toward the negative. But exactly as you say, it doesn't work to suppress negativity. In fact, there's plenty of research showing that when you try to suppress negative emotions, it makes the negativity rebound stronger than ever. So we have to acknowledge the negatives. And as you pointed out, we can often use that to our advantage to work to change problems in our environment. But we can also try to help

• 35:33Speaker 02

  Even out, our brains try to make it a little bit easier for our brains to also notice the positives. And we can just do that through practice, the same way that we learn any kind of cognitive or behavioral habit, right? Think about the first time you're driving in a new route to work. You have to pay a lot of attention. It's kind of hard. Maybe you make a wrong turn. But the 73rd time you are driving, or walking, or biking that same route, you can just do it automatically. It's easy. So the same thing happens with a new way of thinking as a new way of behaving. We can practice

• 36:11Speaker 02

  thinking of positives and use that to not counteract or replace, but to complement our brains' strength of focusing on negatives.

• 36:25Speaker 00

  I understand that your colleague, Robert Emmons, has found that we can spend just a couple of minutes every day, and that can help us retrieve the positive things in our lives?

• 36:36Speaker 02

  Yeah. So in his research, he had participants write for just a few minutes a day about things that they felt grateful or thankful for, and found that it substantially boosted their well-being over the course of the study. There's other research by my colleague, Tomika Yunida, showing that sharing positives with other people can have a real boost for your health. So she looked at older couples sharing positive emotions during their day, or having those positive emotions on their own. And she found that when they shared the positive emotions, that was uniquely good for health. It lowered their cortisol and actually had a lasting effect throughout the day.

• 37:18Speaker 00

  Talk about why this might happen, Alison. Why is it important for us to express our positive emotions, not just feel them?

• 37:25Speaker 02

  I think that when we express emotions to other people, part of what happens is that we're creating a shared reality about them, right? We are not just experiencing them by ourselves, but experiencing them with other people, and that can make them feel more real.

• 37:50Speaker 00

  And I think it's also the case that sometimes as we go through our lives, we take the people around us a bit for granted and we feel like I can tell them all the negative things that are happening, all the things that I'm unhappy about in my life, and we forget to tell them about things that are positive that are going on in our lives. And of course, that's not a good way to spread positivity or to increase the net positivity in the relationship.

• 38:12Speaker 02

  Yes, and there's actually research showing that capitalizing, that's what researchers call it, so celebrating positives with friends and people who are close to us is also very important. So we think about, like, our friends are so important for supporting us when something goes wrong, but it's also really important that we have people around us who can get excited for us when things go well.

• 38:48Speaker 00

  I'm wondering whether you follow this advice yourself. Do you take a couple of minutes every day to write down the great things that are happening in your life or to share positive things that are happening with other people, Alison?

• 39:00Speaker 02

  As with probably everyone, I'm much better at giving advice than following it myself. But I have tried at various points in my life to do the gratitude journaling and sharing positives with other people. So there was one period of time that I was feeling just really down about everything and realized that I was looking on the negative side of things very habitually. And I decided to try writing for a few minutes every evening about things that were positive, things that I appreciated, that I felt grateful for. And at first, it was very difficult. I would just stare at this blank sheet of paper for

• 39:43Speaker 02

  like three minutes or however long I set the timer on my phone. And then the timer would ring and I would be all grumpy and I'd write down "dog," right, I guess.

• 39:54Speaker 00

  As in, you're grateful for your dog? That was the one thing you could think of?

• 39:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was the one, but it wasn't accompanied. I want to be clear. It was not accompanied by like feelings of gratitude. I was mad at myself for making myself do the task.

• 40:08Speaker 02

  And I was basically saying like, technically, my dog's not bad, I guess.

• 40:14Speaker 02

  And after a few days of that, it was definitely multiple days, right? I think I thought of a second example and started feeling slightly more appreciative of the dog. I mean, the dog was great throughout, right? The dog's a dog. The dog is happy to see me. The dog's lovely. It's not her fault.

• 40:31Speaker 02

  But I started thinking like, oh, the dog and the way the dog smiles when I come home. And then a few days after that, it starts getting even easier. And I have maybe several sentences of things that I feel appreciation for. And then what I noticed over the course of a couple of weeks is that I started thinking of those little things during the day, not just when I sat down in the evening to do it intentionally, right? But it had become a more habitual style of thinking.

• 41:05Speaker 00

  So in some ways, you're starting to notice things because in some ways, you're making yourself notice things.

• 41:10Speaker 02

  Right. It starts out intentional. It starts out, I'm walking in a new way to work and I have to pay attention and turn right on this street and think of how my dog is actually a positive thing in my life. And then with practice, it gets easier. With practice, it becomes almost effortless and automatic in other parts of your day.

• 41:35Speaker 00

  Now, please tell me that you have thought positive thoughts, not just about your dog, but there are other things in your life that you also think are positive?

• 41:43Speaker 02

  This is true. There are other things in my life that I also think are positive.

• 41:49Speaker 00

  It reminds me, Alison, that the way you're describing this, this feels so much like the way exercise works. You know, the first day we do it, we're groaning and we're just really reluctant. And we're like, do I have to do this? And you don't like doing this and you don't do very much of it. But of course, if you do it for a week and you do it for two weeks and you do it for a month, it starts to get progressively easier. And then you start to find new things that you'd like to do, new forms of exercise, and they just sort of build on one another.

• 42:17Speaker 02

  Yes, so you're exercising a new thought pattern instead of like a physical muscle. And as you do it, it gets easier and easier.

• 42:34Speaker 00

  So Alison, I understand that people in your life sometimes point out that you don't always practice what you preach in terms of focusing on the positive.

• 42:44Speaker 02

  Plenty of people call me out when I am hypocritical about something, which I appreciate very much. My partner actually had this lovely practice when we first got together of celebrating successes when, right, we're both academics. So this is probably not unique to academia. But we're both academics and every success that we have is partial, is a little step towards the ultimate goal. You don't get a paper accepted. You write the paper and you submit it and then it gets rejected. And then you revise it and you submit it again.

• 43:25Speaker 02

  And then you get requests for revision and then you make the revision, right? It's this long process. My partner had this delightful habit when we got together of celebrating each stage in the process. Each time you take a little step towards your goal with a special dinner. So I submitted the paper, I get a special dinner. I submitted a revision of the paper, I get a special dinner. I got feedback, I get a special dinner. And we've adopted this together because it both helps keep your attention on the positive, right, instead of it getting lost in your day. Because annoyingly, we never get to have a day that's just one success

• 44:09Speaker 02

  and nothing else happens, right? There's always something.

• 44:14Speaker 02

  So if you return to it in the evening, then it helps kind of pull that part of your day out for you and highlight it. And once again, you're sharing it with somebody else. So you're creating this shared reality about it and celebrating it together.

• 44:29Speaker 00

  Another approach you advise people to take is to engage in what you call gain framing. What is gain framing, Alison?

• 44:36Speaker 02

  Gain framing is just what we've been calling positive framing. So one thing I like to do is when I make a mistake, it usually feels bad. I perseverate on it. I think of all the things I wish had happened so that I wouldn't have made the mistake. But then if I can reframe the mistake in my mind as a learning opportunity, it doesn't get rid of all the bad feelings, right? But it focuses my attention on, OK, what can I do differently next time? And I'm kind of putting that energy into creating a new plan for the future.

• 45:15Speaker 00

  Alison, you have a co-author, a political scientist, with whom you have collaborated on a number of projects. And at one point recently, the two of you felt like you had become participants in your own research. Tell me what happened.

• 45:29Speaker 02

  So my colleague, Amber Boydston, here in the Political Science Department at UC Davis, was working with me on just starting this research. And we applied for a grant to fund it. So we write the grant proposal, which is long and hard. We submit it. We wait for months and months to hear back. And finally, one day, we get an email back with the decision. So we hold our breath and cross all our fingers and toes and anything else we can find. And we open it up, and it says, "Our grant has been funded." And we get maybe two seconds of unadulterated joy until we read the next sentence, which says, "Unfortunately, we had to cut your funding by half."

• 46:12Speaker 02

  And we were so disappointed that we lost half of our funding. And we're just sitting there feeling so bad about it. And then we go, wait, wait, but we got half of our funding. Wait, are we, are we participants in our own study here?

• 46:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, because the pleasure of having the grant was stolen almost immediately by the fact that the grant was not what you expected. But of course, it hasn't stolen the entire pleasure, or at least it shouldn't.

• 46:42Speaker 02

  It shouldn't at all. We were still able to do a large portion of the research with the half of the grant that we got. And two minutes before that, right? We hadn't had a grant at all. So we, we almost literally got a half full glass, but immediately focused on the part that was empty.

• 47:00Speaker 00

  That makes me think about one thing that I think happens to a lot of people, which is that when good things happen to us, we tend to absorb them fairly quickly. And then they become part of the background. They become part of the wallpaper, if you will. And so, you know, a second before you opened this, the news to discover that you got the grant, you would have given a lot to know that you got the grant. It would have made you so happy. But the moment you know that you got the grant, that sort of slips away into the background. And everything else, including the fact that the grant was cut in half, that comes into the foreground.

• 47:31Speaker 02

  Yes, and you know, there's this really interesting research on how easily we adapt to our current circumstances. So we level set to whatever the current reality is, the current status quo. And I think this is one of those cases where we can adapt very quickly to a positive and maybe not quite so quickly to a negative.

• 48:02Speaker 00

  You recently had an experience where you made an effort to celebrate the positive. I understand it made a real difference. Can you tell me what happened?

• 48:11Speaker 02

  So in our house, we put everyone's successes on the fridge so that we can celebrate each other's positives and feel better about them ourselves. So a couple of weeks ago, my kid got an award at school. And of course, that goes on the fridge. I guess that's pretty normal to put it on the fridge. But we also try to notice it and mention it to each other when we walk by. And in our house, grown up successes go up on the fridge, too. So that when I have a success or when my partner has a success, that goes up there, too. So for example, my partner comes home yesterday. So he has written a book on relationships that's coming out soon. And yesterday, he came home from recording the audiobook. And he tells me that the director there said that it was one of the best readings he had

• 48:55Speaker 02

  ever heard. And then my partner turns away to go on with his day and do the other 63 things that he has to do, right? And I'm like, no, stop. First of all, that's amazing. That's an amazing thing for somebody to tell you. And second, go write that down right now. Print it out. We're putting it up on the fridge and we're going to talk about it every time I walk by.

• 49:31Speaker 00

  Let's talk a moment about the role that we play in bringing positivity or negativity into the lives of other people, Alison. Very often, I think, when someone is rude to us, when we are having a bad day, we may have a tendency to pass on this negativity to others. So in some ways, negativity begets more negativity. Are there ways to interrupt this cascade?

• 49:54Speaker 02

  I think so. You know, every now and then, I manage to do this in the middle of a fight with my partner or my kid. I see a way to be silly or make a joke. And then suddenly, we can laugh together instead of being stuck in this negative spiral. So a few weeks ago, we were having a family dinner and we had just washed the tablecloth. And my kid kept spilling little things on the table. She'd spill like a little bit of a sauce. Or one noodle, right? And my partner and I would rush to to clean it up. And we're all getting kind of more and more stressed about trying to keep a tablecloth clean so that we don't have to do laundry again. And suddenly, I just had this impulse.

• 50:39Speaker 02

  So I picked up a big handful of what we were having for dinner, and I just slapped it down on the tablecloth. So there's this huge mess everywhere. And I'm like, I guess we're doing laundry. And we all get to laugh about it, right? Instead of being kind of sniping at each other and stuck in this negative space.

• 50:54Speaker 00

  Yeah. I think it's sometimes hard when people treat us badly, when we are the recipients of negativity, to respond with something that is not negativity. You know, psychologists have long talked about the the norm of reciprocity. You know, we are kind when we're treated kindly. We are rude when we're treated rudely. But really, I think what you're pointing to or what you're recommending is that we are kind when we're treated rudely. That's not easy to do.

• 51:19Speaker 02

  It's not easy at all. And to be clear, I usually don't. But I I think we can try, right? And then every now and then, there's this little window of opportunity that we get to interrupt that negative cycle.

• 51:38Speaker 00

  I'm wondering, after having done all of this work on the negativity bias, do you feel like you yourself are able to be less negative as you go through your life, Alison?

• 51:52Speaker 02

  I think the answer to that probably depends on the day. Some days, I'm doing it pretty well, and some days, I'm not, and that's OK. But really, what helps me is to think about these two pieces together. There's what is the negative focus telling me? How can I use anger or negativity to fuel me? I try to think about bad mood as information. It's a messenger. It's saying something is wrong. And then also, how can I balance out that negativity with some positives in my own life?

• 52:48Speaker 00

  Rebalancing negative emotions with positive emotions can be powerful. Paying attention to the good things in our lives can help us remember what we have stopped noticing. It can remind us that there are silver linings to life's problems.

• 53:03Speaker 00

  But there are certain situations where the intensity of a negative emotion can make it very hard to see anything positive. The dark cloud hides the silver lining.

• 53:15Speaker 00

  Let me tell you a story we received from a listener named Chris. Chris used to spend her days working in one of the most beautiful, awe-inspiring places in the world.

• 53:24Speaker 05

  I used to work as a river guide in the Grand Canyon for a long time. And we used to do kind of teen building, group building, fun things all day long.

• 53:37Speaker 00

  After playing the waters of the canyon all day, the group would gather around the campfire for one last bonding activity before they went to sleep.

• 53:47Speaker 00

  As the stars twinkled above them in the inky night sky.

• 53:52Speaker 05

  We would floss our teeth together.

• 53:55Speaker 00

  They would floss their teeth together.

• 53:59Speaker 00

  And that's not all. Perhaps you're picturing 20 people standing around and simultaneously flossing their teeth. Uh-uh, that's not what happened.

• 54:08Speaker 05

  I mean, everybody, you can have up to 20 people flossing their teeth with the same piece of dental floss.

• 54:17Speaker 00

  The same piece of dental floss. Now, before you lose your lunch or call the dental police on Chris, there's an asterisk that makes the story less unsettling. Slightly less unsettling.

• 54:30Speaker 05

  I don't mean everybody sharing that from one person to the next, but you take a new spool of dental floss and stretch it out as far as it will go. So you each get your own clean, untouched little section. But everybody's flossing with the same piece at the same time.

• 54:44Speaker 00

  So imagine a long string of floss, maybe 30 feet long. Your section of the dental floss is clean and unspoiled. You can see that. But inches from you is someone else pulling on the same string, getting inside their gums. Would you grab your piece of string and floss away with gusto?

• 55:01Speaker 05

  When I think about that now, or when I tell somebody else about that now, they are disgusted, even though you know that nobody else has touched your piece of dental floss. And it's pretty funny how it's clean, but it's still disgusting.

• 55:21Speaker 00

  I'm guessing that if you find the story disgusting, thinking about all the beautiful stars in the night sky over the Grand Canyon will not help. In the early days of Hidden Brain, I often described myself as a card-carrying rationalist. Since then, however, I've learned the endless ways in which humans can be anything but rational. Our visceral response to things we perceive as disgusting is a prime example. Logic and our own eyes may tell us that something is safe and clean, but our emotions can tell us a very different story. When we come back, remarkable stories of revulsion. We'll delve into the icky and endlessly fascinating science of disgust.

• 56:04Speaker 00

  You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 56:21Speaker 06

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• 56:37Speaker 07

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• 57:08Speaker 00

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 57:12Speaker 00

  What do you find disgusting? Cockroaches? Moldy food? Your kids' stinky gym socks?

• 57:20Speaker 00

  We each have our own lists of things that revolt us and our own internal barometers for how easily we are disgusted by things that are rotten, smelly, or diseased. That's part of what makes disgust so fascinating. It's driven by a combination of emotions, reflexes, and cultural cues.

• 57:43Speaker 00

  We recently talked about all this with David Pizarro. He's a psychologist at Cornell University, and he joined us for an episode titled, "Yuck: The Science of Disgust." Listeners had many stories and questions that they shared in response to that conversation, and David returns to the show today to discuss them. David Pizarro, welcome back to Hidden Brain.

• 58:04Speaker 06

  Thank you. Thank you for having me again.

• 58:07Speaker 00

  David, one of the striking things about disgust is that it spreads. It contaminates other things. The fly that is sitting on the slice of toast makes the toast inedible. Why do disgusting things seem to infect other things?

• 58:23Speaker 06

  It's a great question, and it's often been observed about disgust that, you know, one fly on your toast ruins the toast, but one piece of toast on a group of flies does not somehow cleanse the flies. And the thought is that because disgust, it is widely believed, is an emotion that evolved to keep us from getting sick long before humans had any sort of germ theory of disease, disgust nonetheless was tracking contagion. And so disgust seems to be the one emotion that works via this kind of contagion process.

• 59:01Speaker 00

  Many listeners wanted to learn more about why some of us tolerate things better than others. Here's Veronica from Michigan.

• 59:10Speaker 06

  Tell me more about why I'm able to go pick up roadkill on the side of the road and complete weirdo things like taxidermy projects or bone articulation projects, whereas my peers just sort of recoil in horror and probably judgment when I tell them about this hobby. Thanks so much.

• 59:31Speaker 00

  So David, is there something special about people like Veronica?

• 59:35Speaker 06

  Well, there is something different about people like Veronica, but there might be one of two things that's different. Veronica might be overall less likely to be disgusted in general at a whole bunch of different things. Or Veronica might have gotten used to specifically those projects that she referred to. So we can get used to doing things. Anybody who's had to clean toilets, you know, knows that it might be the grossest thing you do the first time you do it, but after a while, you just have to get used to it. And so we can develop very domain-specific adaptation to disgust. But Veronica might be one of those people who is just on that end of the distribution

• 1:00:17Speaker 06

  that who just isn't bothered in general by lots of disgusting things.

• 1:00:22Speaker 00

  We talked in our earlier discussion about how love and lust can temporarily mute our disgust responses. So you might find another child's soil diaper disgusting, but you don't find your own baby's soil diaper disgusting. You might not want to share someone's dental floss, but you're willing to lock your mouth on someone else's mouth if you're in love. Why is this, David?

• 1:00:45Speaker 06

  Well, you know, this is speculation. Whenever we talk about evolved mechanisms, we can't go back in evolutionary time and look. But it is thought that if there is one time where it is important to not feel too much disgust at what you're doing, it would be during that time when we engage in reproductive activities. Because as I say sometimes to my students, if you thought about what you were doing in the moment, you probably wouldn't want to do it. And so it's important to be able to turn off that little switch. And I think that the same Goes for having to take care of people we love.

• 1:01:20Speaker 00

  Hmm. We received an interesting question from listener Lori about people who are more sensitive to disgust. I just listened to your episode on disgust and I found it really interesting and couldn't help but maybe compare those who um display disgust to also being individuals that demonstrate high preferences on everything from toilet paper to how a spouse looks

• 1:01:58Speaker 00

  or beyond. So um yeah, I was interested to to know if there is a correlation and what that might be. I appreciate your show so much. What do you think, David? Is there any research showing that people who are highly sensitive to disgust are also more particular or even more controlling in other dimensions of their lives?

• 1:02:23Speaker 06

  It's a great question that Lori asks, and the answer is a little bit unclear, and I'll I'll say why. It depends on what kind of disgust you're talking about. So some people do um distinguish between moral disgust, sexual disgust, or what they call pathogen disgust. The thing that I've been talking about the most, the thing that keeps you away from disease. And when you look at other personality traits, it seems as if um there is not a whole lot of correlation between the tendency to feel grossed out in the pathogen disgust way and personality traits that might be similar to controllingness.

• 1:03:05Speaker 06

  There is a little bit of of uh an effect such that people who are high in Machiavellianism, which is a trait that that you might consider an extreme form of controlling, that is a desire to control others for your own gain. And that actually shows a negative.

• 1:03:27Speaker 06

  Although small correlation with disgust. And so, so there's not a whole lot that is, I would say, is demonstrating a strong relationship between disgust sensitivity and some of these other personality variables.

• 1:03:41Speaker 00

  And when you say there's an inverse correlation between Machiavellianism and disgust, you're saying that people who are low in disgust are high in Machiavellian tendencies?

• 1:03:51Speaker 06

  That, that's right. That's right. Or people, yes, you could say people who are easily disgusted are less likely to be Machiavellian.

• 1:03:58Speaker 00

  We talked in our earlier conversation about the role of smell in eliciting feelings of disgust. Listener Emily had a question about a different sense and its impact on our experience of disgust.

• 1:04:10Speaker 06

  Apropos of your show on disgust, I would like to pose the question of visual disgust, not just smell, but there's sometimes when I see patterns of repeated shapes.

• 1:04:27Speaker 06

  It could be a bunch of pebbles or a way things are put together, but more often it resembles like a swarm, a swarm of bugs. I just feel such a visceral sense of repulsion that I could throw up. Any comments about that? That is a great question, Emily. There are quite a few people who report the kind of disgust reaction that you're reporting. In fact, it has a name, tryphophobia. Tryphophobia is a disgust response to small holes, patterns, bumps that occur sort of in a regular pattern

• 1:05:09Speaker 06

  as Emily was describing. And it seems as if maybe there is an evolved evolutionary explanation for why we might have them because there's an association between those kinds of patterns and maybe some diseases that are visible on the skin.

• 1:05:31Speaker 06

  But that is speculation. But I want to tell Emily that she's definitely not alone. And she definitely should not Google the word tryphophobia.

• 1:05:43Speaker 00

  It strikes me as you're describing this, David, that it might be that it's not just that we differ from other people when it comes to disgust, it also might be that each of us has different sensitivities when it comes to our different senses. So some of us might be more prone to disgust that comes to us through our noses, and others might be more disgusted by something that we touch.

• 1:06:05Speaker 06

  I think that's exactly right, and there is some research showing that women have a lower threshold for olfactory stimuli that might make them disgusted. And there are ways to measure that threshold. You know, you give people sort of increasing doses of a smell, and you can chart them to see where they are on how sensitive they are to smells. And it seems as if women have a particular sensitivity to disgust smells. There's another thing that's very interesting about smell specifically as compared to vision. Smell is one of the senses that has a much more direct path to our emotions.

• 1:06:49Speaker 06

  It sort of bypasses a lot of the areas of the brain that other sensory inputs get processed through. And that's why some people, you know, will report that they get an immediate sense of nostalgia when they smell something, or they're transported to a memory of an old girlfriend or boyfriend when they smell a perfume or cologne. And disgust is very strong in that olfactory sense as well. The sight of feces does not do as good a job as the smell of feces in inducing disgust.

• 1:07:26Speaker 00

  Listener Lisa sent us a question highlighting how we can often have a different bar for what we consider disgusting, based on whether it's us or someone else doing the thing in question.

• 1:07:38Speaker 06

  I wonder why, when I do certain personal things, like lick icing off my finger, it's fine, but when another family member does it... I find it extremely disgusting. So just thought I'd throw that into the hopper for your consideration.

• 1:07:58Speaker 00

  So it seems like our capacity for disgust has a great deal of hypocrisy woven into it, David.

• 1:08:06Speaker 06

  Yes, I think Lisa has discovered this very, very deep part of human psychology, which is when other people do things, it's worse than when we do them. There are things that are not disgusting because it is us, it is part of us, our bodily fluids, our bodily processes. Another thing is that you can't see yourself doing it. Maybe if Lisa were to watch herself, you know, if someone took a video of her licking her ice cream in a weird way, she would feel disgust for that. But when it's you doing it, then, you know, you're, you're, you're not likely to feel that disgust. Because imagine, Shankar, how much disgust we would feel if we were constantly disgusted by the things that we do.

• 1:08:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, we would be paralyzed by disgust.

• 1:08:51Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 1:09:00Speaker 00

  When we come back, the social dimensions of disgust. What we're signaling when we express disgust to another person. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 1:09:15Speaker 06

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• 1:09:40Speaker 07

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• 1:10:09Speaker 00

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 1:10:14Speaker 00

  At Cornell University, David Pizarro studies the science of disgust. He returns to the show today for our recurring segment, Your Questions Answered.

• 1:10:25Speaker 00

  What we find disgusting can be shaped by where we live. It's also shaped by the moment in which we live. We received an email about that from listener Mary, who writes, "People used to use the same toothpicks and pass it around the table after eating in the 1800s, or just dumping waste right into the streets back in the Middle Ages. Is our disgust ever evolving?" What do you think of Mary's question, David?

• 1:10:52Speaker 06

  I think Mary makes a very good point, which is it's important to understand that social context influences all of our emotions and disgust is included in that. There are customs, there are ways of behaving that in one time and place might seem very disgusting and in another one, don't. Sometimes that's out of sheer necessity. We didn't always have the ability to have, you know, very clean bathrooms that we could use every day. And so, as you mentioned earlier, we might burn out if we had to consistently feel disgust for just something that was a part of life. But context, social context, does shape everything.

• 1:11:37Speaker 06

  And it's easy to lose sight of that when we talk about an emotion that seems so strong and to have such a strong evolutionary basis for it. We often point to the similarities and how strong some of these disgust elicitors are across cultures. But the reality is, what you find disgusting... And what I find disgusting is going to be some sort of result of our upbringing, our culture, our personal habits and our individual sensitivity to disgusting things.

• 1:12:11Speaker 00

  Hmm. Is it possible, David, that you think we're living in a particularly disgust sensitive time right now?

• 1:12:19Speaker 06

  I I suspect that we are. I don't have any direct data on whether or not people have been getting more disgust sensitive, and I'm certain this would vary across the world. In the United States, in this time and place, it's very easy to go around not feeling disgusted because there are so many efforts made for cleanliness. There are billions and billions of dollars spent on cleaning products. We do not want to see disgusting things in our homes. We get rid of them easily. I think it's easier than ever to live an antiseptic life.

• 1:12:59Speaker 00

  Hmm. We talked in our earlier discussion about how disgust has often been used to tarnish women in public life and in politics. Remind me of some of that history, David?

• 1:13:12Speaker 06

  The rhetoric of disgust is one of those very ugly pieces of human history, but it's strong. And so what you see very clearly is that certain groups are often tagged with the emotion of disgust, usually by pointing out something about them that is perceived to be disgusting, or people are trying to persuade others that they're disgusting. And so you get comments about Hillary going to the bathroom or or menstruating. That's always been something that in the hands of men is low hanging fruit to try to to make women seem inferior. In fact,

• 1:13:55Speaker 06

  if you look at some of the earliest codes that we have from old civil Civilizations, a menstruating woman is a woman who had to be separated from the camp. And so, in particular, women's dirt, women's bodily fluid, that the disgusting aspects of of one gender have been used against them in a very powerful way.

• 1:14:25Speaker 00

  Listener Alon had a very interesting question about the relationship between disgust and gender stereotypes.

• 1:14:33Speaker 06

  Once, when I was a boy, I saw a group of other boys playing with a snail. They dared me to touch it, but I refused because I was grossed out. So they jeered me with statements like, what, are you a girl? Even as an adult, I noticed people connecting the concept of masculinity with the bravery to withstand disgust, like eating raw meat, or mud wrestling, or even the movie cliche of a man on a date placing his coat on a puddle so his girlfriend can cross without getting dirty. On the other hand, masculinity is politically associated with conservatism, which itself is associated with strong aversion to disgusting things.

• 1:15:18Speaker 06

  How would you explain this paradox?

• 1:15:21Speaker 00

  I love this question, David. What do you think?

• 1:15:23Speaker 06

  Well, that is a really good question for Malon. I definitely agree about the masculinity. I don't know if this is a cultural universal, but it certainly is part of my experience. There was constant testing of the boundaries of how how much you could deal with disgusting things. And it wasn't just disgust, at least in my experience. It was any sort of negative emotion. As a man, you were supposed to be able to deal with it. So I remember tests of pain. You know, you brought your friend in and you did something to them, see how long they could last before they complained. And if it was too fast, then they were, you know, wusses or whatever gendered insults you could bring.

• 1:16:06Speaker 06

  So I very much think that that is that is the case. I also think that ironically, Women in their life end up having to deal with a lot more disgusting things than men ever do. So, so this is, I, I believe largely performance on the part of men.

• 1:16:26Speaker 06

  As for the conservative liberal finding, I don't know what to make of this because this is not a gendered finding either. This is both men and women who report being more politically conservative, report being more disgust sensitive. So, you know, there are always multiple factors that are going to influence how much disgust any given person feels. And there's gonna be something like the, the culture, the individual difference, the male female stereotypes, and many other things.

• 1:17:04Speaker 00

  We received an email from listener Martin, who's interested in knowing more about the intersection between disgust and religious practices. Martin writes, "There was no mention at all of such concepts as original sin and its cleansing through baptism, holy communion, and other rites, nor was any mention made of dietary laws and unclean foods, animals, or objects in Judaism and Islam. Are these concepts based on disgust? So David, I know that you're not a scholar of religion, but what do you make of the role that disgust may play in religious practices and beliefs?

• 1:17:38Speaker 06

  Well, I love this question, Martin, because I have been increasingly interested in this aspect of not just disgust, but I would say purity more broadly. In fact, I'm teaching a seminar on this topic. And we've read a lot of literature from religious scholars and clinical psychologists. And there does seem to be this overlap in religious practices in some religions and cleanliness and purity. Sometimes it's metaphorical, like cleansing your soul through confession. Sometimes it's absolutely physical.

• 1:18:15Speaker 06

  We must do ablutions before prayer. And I think that that it runs deep in our religions. And I think that there is a power to purity and to being pure that has sort of metaphorically become associated with being a good person, being closer to God. And so absolutely, there is a link. And I think purity is deeper than disgust. So one of the questions Martin asks is, are these rituals driven by disgust? And they don't need to be. You don't need to be disgusted to wash your feet, you know, or do ablutions or get baptized.

• 1:18:59Speaker 06

  But I believe that it is the same underlying mechanism that we all share, which is keeping clean helps keep us disease free.

• 1:19:15Speaker 00

  When we come back, listeners share their techniques for quieting disgust. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

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• 1:20:26Speaker 00

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. By its very nature, disgust seems like one of the hardest emotions to control. Our response to things that gross us out can be visceral. But as we've discussed, what we find disgusting can vary from person to person and also across time and culture. If we want to confront our own feelings of disgust, where should we start? Today, we're hearing listener suggestions and talking with psychologist David Pizarro at Cornell University. He studies the science of disgust. David, I'd like to start this conversation with a message we received from a listener named John. He's a minister in North Carolina, and he had an interesting perspective on disgust.

• 1:21:08Speaker 04

  As a young pastor, part of my clinical training was to work as a chaplain at Allentown State Mental Hospital in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Many of the situations I had to deal with in that setting evoked horror, revulsion, or disgust. I had to learn to face those feelings and get them under control. Otherwise, they would dominate the interaction, and I would have been powerless to help the patient. It's always seemed to me that there are three ways of dealing with strong primitive emotions. One is to conceal them, to simply hide our feelings from others without dealing with them at all. This leaves the emotions driving the bust.

• 1:21:52Speaker 04

  We're just hiding it, and we're not being honest about it with ourselves. The other is to control, sort of like the Von Kluyns in Star Trek, to manhandle the emotions and try not to let them direct our actions. But the best is to confront, to honestly face the primitive emotions, acknowledging them to ourselves and sometimes to others, but also to understand them and set them aside, realizing that they do not represent reality, but simply an unhelpful emotional response.

• 1:22:24Speaker 00

  David, I hadn't thought of this before, but if you're a pastor or a counselor who's trying to help others, you have to be able to listen to things that people do with compassion and not turn away in disgust. That's absolutely right, and I think John is making such an important point about how we deal.

• 1:22:43Speaker 05

  With other humans that might be disgusting to us. And it sounds like John is taking a very compassionate approach. I do not think that it is always the case that these emotions are not in touch with reality. You know, I think we've made the case that disgust is important. It's functional and sometimes it gives you a signal that you should avoid something. But we have other goals. And if one of your goals is to show compassion and mercy to somebody, some of the people who are worst off in society, people who might not have the ability to bathe regularly or who might be carrying disease.

• 1:23:25Speaker 05

  It is one of the ultimate signs of, I think, compassion to be able to go about your business without letting that bother you. Because from the perspective of the person, they know that others are disgusted by them. And just to feel that somebody isn't showing disgust toward them, I think, is an act of true kindness. And there are many stories of religious figures, including Mother Teresa, who would purposefully make a show of handling, touching, hugging, kissing

• 1:24:02Speaker 05

  people who would otherwise be viewed as so disgusting by others as a way to show that compassion can override that disgust.

• 1:24:12Speaker 00

  I'm wondering if we're doing work that is mission driven or something we are deeply passionate about. Are we less likely to experience disgust? I mean, we heard from a number of doctors and nurses, for example, who feel that they have a much higher threshold for dealing with disease and injuries that others might find disgusting.

• 1:24:30Speaker 05

  Yes, I think that there are two things going on there. One is that people who might not be as easily disgusted go into those kinds of jobs. But that's not the whole story. There is research showing that first year of medical school, pre and post, or right when you get into medical school, your disgust sensitivity levels are pretty much the same as everybody else's. But after that year of having to do things like dissect cadavers, you adapt and you adapt specifically to human bodies and the kinds of things that you. You need to, you know, deal with as a medical doctor or other medical professional every day.

• 1:25:12Speaker 05

  But I do think that you're pointing Shankar to something deeper that intersects with John's question, which is, we talked about love and lust overriding disgust. And it's easy when it's your child, you know, to be less grossed out by their diaper. It's easy when it's somebody that you're sexually attracted to. But when it's somebody who is the worst of the worst in society, can you allow compassion to override the reflexive disgust that others feel? And I think this is just the part of discipline that might come from dedicating your life to that sort of thing.

• 1:25:51Speaker 00

  We've talked on Hidden Brain in the past about the concept of awe and the many benefits it can have for our mental health and outlook. Listener Catherine wrote to talk about how she uses beauty to help her grapple with things that she finds disgusting. I've struggled with disgust sensitivity all of my life and believe it played an important role in a serious eating disorder I developed when I was 12 and a half. In addition to using medication and therapy and other medical treatments, I've learned to use beauty and awe as a way to manage my disgust. When I feel disgusted and I'm triggered, I think back on something I found beautiful. A flower, waterfall. I'm curious if there's any evidence for this approach

• 1:26:36Speaker 00

  and if you have recommendations on other sort of daily habits or mindsets those of us who struggle can use. So disgust affects us less and our reactions don't hurt the people around us. What do you think of Catherine's strategy and do you have any suggestions, David?

• 1:26:55Speaker 05

  I think it's a wonderful strategy and it's quite inspiring, actually, to hear Catherine describe it that way. And I believe that those kinds of strategies are available to us all. She asked for some specifics. There is a strategy. Of what's called attentional deployment. So just simply shifting your attention from one thing to another. So that you're not paying attention to the thing that you find disgusting. I think more more effective is reappraisal. So appraising something as different. Not thinking about it as the disgusting thing, but rather maybe as having beauty in it. Focusing on that.

• 1:27:39Speaker 05

  You know, the low level form of this is when you're a kid and you you're watching a gross movie. Convince yourself that it's ketchup and not blood. You're sort of reappraising at a low level so that you don't feel disgusted. That's a bit harder when you know the reality of the situation. In fact, interestingly, it's harder for odors than it is for vision. It's hard. But we have a lot of these kinds of strategies for emotion regulation that are available to us. And I think that is part of being a mature adult who's able to effectively regulate these emotions in order to be more effective at dealing with other human beings. And in this case, showing kindness and compassion to other human beings.

• 1:28:24Speaker 05

  Whatever whatever works for you, I think, is the good thing to aim for.

• 1:28:30Speaker 00

  I mean, I'm thinking about someone who's a nurse or someone who's a doctor. And maybe, you know, you're interacting with a patient and perhaps your immediate visceral response might be disgust. But if you spend a little time, you might say, you know, this person has an interesting history. This person has an interesting story. This person has interesting ideas. And in some ways, what you're reminding yourself of is that the thing that has brought the person into the hospital might not be the entire sum of who that person is.

• 1:28:58Speaker 05

  That's a lovely way of saying it. And I think that we often talk about objectification of other humans when talking about sexuality. But there is a way in which we can objectify somebody's physical body in this negative way. And I think. What you're pointing to is that, you know, these are people with hopes and desires and wishes and dreams. And they are as interesting as anybody else. And opening yourself up to that will be a natural way of shifting your attention, of reappraising the situation. And you know what? We get used to smells. We get used to the sight of disease. All of that we can get accustomed to.

• 1:29:42Speaker 05

  But what you can't do is take back the disgust that you demonstrated to somebody who was just there because they needed your help.

• 1:29:51Speaker 00

  Hmm. It can sometimes be an alienating experience when you're disgusted by something that most people like. Listener Allison has an interesting hack for getting people to understand where she's coming from when she tells them that she dislikes cheese. A lot of people don't quite understand the extent to which it disgusts me. So a few years back, I started saying, well, just substitute the words dog waste for cheese. As in, you don't even like dog waste on your pizza? What about just a little bit of dog waste cooked in the sauce? Or if I just throw some dog waste into the salad, are you okay picking it out? That dip has dog waste in it, but it's mild.

• 1:30:36Speaker 00

  You can barely taste it. They get it now, even if they think I'm a freak. What do you make of Allison's strategy, David?

• 1:30:44Speaker 05

  I love it. I love it.

• 1:30:48Speaker 05

  Now, of course, I'm sure that she can't convince people that cheese is disgusting. But at the very least, she can convince them, once you find something disgusting, what is a reasonable way to eat it? And in her case, there is no reasonable way to eat it. I think that is a very, very smart, uh, smart way.

• 1:31:08Speaker 00

  To fight that fight.

• 1:31:11Speaker 00

  In our earlier conversation, David, we talked about how disgust is used in politics to vilify opponents, but it's also used in public health to try and trigger people's disgust about certain behaviors. Listener Garima writes, I wanted to share an example of how Singapore's health minister used disgust for his anti-vaping campaign. The short-form video went mega-viral. It speaks the language of Gen Z and channels a very strong emotion to highlight the impact of vaping. Time to spill some tea. This is a healthy lung. And this one is unhealthy. All the white stuff is infected pus. And when you vape, it may smell like watermelon or lychee, but actually you are taking in very harmful chemical substances. This could include ingredients such as.

• 1:31:56Speaker 00

  What do you make of using disgust in public health campaigns, David? I think they can be very effective. You and I are probably of a generation that remember pictures of diseased lungs using, being used to scare us out of smoking. It can be tricky because there is sometimes a, such a strong disgust that is induced that might even be wrapped up with fear and what you might get is people simply avoiding the message. And, and what you don't want to do is let people disengage from the message.

• 1:32:36Speaker 00

  But I think there is a sweet spot there, and I think that it's been used quite effectively in handwashing campaigns for when there are pandemics like the flu. I think it's a, it's an emotion that can be harnessed for good in this way. You know, I remember an anti-smoking public health campaign some years ago that used the tagline, kissing a smoker is like licking an ashtray. And it reminded me that even though the public health core message, you know, smoking is bad for you, it can give you lung cancer, it can give you emphysema, you would think that those messages would be what people listen to. It's striking that, at least for many young people, the idea that You know, kissing a smoker is like licking an ashtray.

• 1:33:20Speaker 00

  That message might end up being more persuasive.

• 1:33:23Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think that's right. And that does, I think, hit a sweet spot where the disgust is working. But it's not, it's not kicking in the fear that would maybe lead to avoidance. So as a strategy, and in particular, one that is getting at the fears of young people, which is that I might not be attractive to the people I find attractive. I think that could be a strong one. I don't know if anybody ever did this, but one of the things that kept me from smoking was the knowledge that it would give me wrinkles. And I just didn't, I was so vain that I did not want to have wrinkles early on in life.

• 1:34:02Speaker 00

  I mean, it's so funny and striking to me that people care more about their appearance and their vanity than about their, you know, their capacity to breathe.

• 1:34:10Speaker 06

  I know, and to die. I think it's very hard for us to represent something as a, as a mortal risk. But it's easy to think that we might be ugly today.

• 1:34:24Speaker 00

  David Pizarro is a psychologist at Cornell University. David, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

• 1:34:31Speaker 06

  Thank you so much. This was great. Thank, thank you, listeners, for sending in such wonderful, vivid stories.

• 1:34:39Speaker 00

  We also heard today from psychologist Alison Ledgerwood, who studies the negativity bias at the University of California, Davis.

• 1:34:48Speaker 00

  Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristin 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.

• 1:35:08Speaker 00

  If you love Hidden Brain and want more of the ideas we explore on the show, check out our new YouTube channel. And if you like our videos, please share them with a friend or family member. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.