Authors: Paul Bloom
49
After World War II started, Americans switched their attitudes about the Chinese and the Japanese:
Berreby,
Us and Them.
50
adults tend to rate individuals with certain non-native accents as less competent:
A. Gluszek and J. F. Dovidio, “The Way They Speak: A Social Psychological Perspective on the Stigma of Nonnative Accents in Communication,”
Personality and Social Psychology Review
14 (2010): 214–37.
51
we are prone to think of members of highly unfamiliar out-groups as lacking emotions that are seen as uniquely human:
S. Loughnan, N. Haslam, T. Murnane, J. Vaes, C. Reynolds, and C. Suitner, “Objectification Leads to Depersonalization: The Denial of Mind and Moral Concern to Objectified Others,”
European Journal of Social Psychology
40 (2010): 709–17; J. Ph. Leyens, M. P. Paladino, R. T. Rodriguez, J. Vaes, S. Demoulin, A. P. Rodriguez, and R. Gaunt, “The Emotional Side of Prejudice: The Attribution of Secondary Emotions to Ingroups and Outgroups,”
Personality and Social Psychology Review
4 (2000): 186–97.
52
The typical participants in a psychology experiment … may well be the least racist people in the world:
A. R. Pearson, J. F. Dovidio, and S. L. Gaertner, “The Nature of Contemporary Prejudice: Insights from Aversive Racism,”
Social and Personality Psychology Compass
3 (2009): 314–38.
53
Children don’t start off seeing race as taboo:
E. P. Apfelbaum, K. Pauker, N. Ambady, S. R. Sommers, and M. I. Norton, “Learning (Not) to Talk About Race: When Older Children Underperform in Social Categorization,”
Developmental Psychology
44 (2008): 1513–18.
54
a pressing anxiety about appearing racist:
Pearson, Dovidio, and Gaertner, “Nature of Contemporary Prejudice.”
55
even the least racist people in the world have unconscious racial biases:
For review, see M. R. Banaji and L. Heiphetz, “Attitudes,” in
Handbook of Social Psychology
, ed. Susan T. Fiske, Daniel T. Gilbert, and Gardner Lindzey (New York: Wiley, 2010), 348–88.
56
The worst example I ever saw was during an episode of the television show
Lie to Me
:
From
Lie to Me
, Fox, Season 1, Episode 5 (“Unchained”).
57
some critics have argued that such findings tell us little about stereotyping and prejudice in the real world:
H. Arkes and P. E. Tetlock, “Attributions of Implicit Prejudice, or ‘Would Jesse Jackson Fail the Implicit Association Test?’,”
Psychological Inquiry
15 (2004): 257–78.
58
these measures correlate with considerations that really matter:
A. G. Greenwald, A. Poehlman, E. Uhlmann, and M. R. Banaji, “Understanding and Interpreting the Implicit Association Test III: Meta-analysis of Predictive Validity,”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
97 (2009): 17–41; Banaji and Heiphetz, “Attitudes”; Pearson, Dovidio, and Gaertner, “Nature of Contemporary Prejudice.”
59
Asian applicants to universities have higher-than-average SAT scores:
Thomas. J. Espenshade and Alexandria W. Radford,
No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal: Race and Class in Elite College Admission and Campus Life
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).
60
As the psychologist Francisco Gil-White points out … it’s a statement about the ethnicities of their ancestors:
F. Gil-White, “Are Ethnic Groups Biological ‘Species’ to the Human Brain? Essentialism in Our Cognition of Some Social Categories,”
Current Anthropology
42 (2001): 515–54.
61
“one of the natural founts of human imagination and creative pleasure”:
Berreby,
Us and Them
, xiv.
62
The philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah:
Kwame Anthony Appiah,
Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers
(New York: Norton, 2006), 98.
63
Appiah cites Cicero on this point:
Appiah,
Cosmopolitanism
, xviii.
5. BODIES
1
Primo Levi tells how the Nazis denied Jewish prisoners access to toilets:
Primo Levi,
The Drowned and the Saved
(London: Abacus, 1988), 70–71.
2
“a being disgustingly soft and porous …”:
Martha C. Nussbaum,
Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of the Emotions
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 347.
3
George Orwell is eloquent about the role of disgust in class divisions:
George Orwell,
The Road to Wigan Pier
(London: Penguin, 1937), 79.
4
Certain objects, substances, and experiences:
For reviews, see P. Rozin, J. Haidt, and C. R. McCauley, “Disgust,” in
Handbook of Emotions
, 3rd ed., ed. Michael Lewis, Jeannette M. Haviland-Jones, and Lisa F. Barrett (New York: Guilford Press), 757–76; Paul Bloom,
Descartes’ Baby: How the Science of Child Development Explains What Makes Us Human
(New York: Basic Books, 2004); Daniel Kelly,
Yuck! The Nature and Moral Significance of Disgust
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011); Rachel Herz,
That’s Disgusting: Unraveling the Mysteries of Repulsion
(New York: Norton, 2012); William Ian Miller,
The Anatomy of Disgust
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).
5
a scale to measure people’s “disgust sensitivity”:
J. Haidt, C. McCauley, and P. Rozin, “Individual-Differences in Sensitivity to Disgust: A Scale Sampling 7 Domains of Disgust Elicitors,”
Personality and Individual Differences
16 (1994): 701–13. For a modified version, see B. O. Olatunji, N. L. Williams, D. F. Tolin, C. N. Sawchuck, J. S. Abramowitz, J. M. Lohr, and L. S. Elwood, “The Disgust Scale: Item Analysis, Factor Structure, and Suggestions for Refinement,”
Psychological Assessment
19 (2007): 281–97.
6
people’s disgust sensitivity ratings predict how willing they are to actually engage in disgusting activities:
P. Rozin, J. Haidt, C. McCauley, L. Dunlop, and M. Ashmore, “Individual Differences in Disgust Sensitivity: Comparisons and Evaluations of Paper-and-Pencil Versus Behavioral Measures,”
Journal of Research in Personality
33 (1999): 330–51.
7
William Ian Miller’s explanation … tears lack the physical properties of disgusting substances:
Miller,
The Anatomy of Disgust
, 90.
8
“The excreta arouse no disgust in children”:
Sigmund Freud,
Civilization and Its Discontents
(New York: Norton, 1961), 54.
9
young children will touch and even eat all manner of disgusting things:
P. Rozin, L. Hammer, H. Oster, T. Horowitz, and V. Marmora, “The Child’s Conception of Food: Differentiation of
Categories of Rejected Substances in the 1.4 to 5 Year Range,”
Appetite
7 (1986): 141–51.
10
Don’t try to make the child share your adult disgust at feces
:
Penelope Leach,
Your Baby and Child: From Birth to Age Five
(New York: Knopf, 1989), 317.
11
everything else in this passage is mistaken:
See also Bloom,
Descartes’ Baby.
12
disgust evolved to ward us away from eating bad foods:
Rozin, Haidt, and McCauley, “Disgust.”
13
“It is remarkable how readily and instantly retching or actual vomiting is induced”:
Charles Darwin,
The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals
(1872; repr., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 257.
14
pregnant women are exceptionally disgust-sensitive:
D. M. T. Fessler, S. J. Eng, and C. D. Navarrete, “Elevated Disgust Sensitivity in the First Trimester of Pregnancy: Evidence Supporting the Compensatory Prophylaxis Hypothesis,”
Evolution and Human Behavior
26 (2005): 344–51.
15
the anterior insular cortex … becomes active when people are shown disgusting pictures:
B. Wicker, C. Keysers, J. Plailly, J. P. Royet, V. Gallese, and G. Rizzolatti, “Both of Us Disgusted in My Insula: The Common Neural Basis of Seeing and Feeling Disgust,”
Neuron
40 (2003): 655–64; P. Wright, G. He, N. A. Shapira, W. K. Goodman, and Y. Liu, “Disgust and the Insula: fMRI Responses to Pictures of Mutilation and Contamination,”
Neuroreport
15 (2004): 2347–51.
16
Some have argued that the food-based theory is incomplete:
For discussion, see Kelly,
Yuck!
17
disgust has evolved to warn us away from pathogens and parasites more generally:
V. Curtis, R. Aunger, and T. Rabie, “Evidence That Disgust Evolved to Protect from Risk of Disease,”
Proceedings of the Royal Society B
271 (2004): 131–33. For review, see V. Curtis, M. DeBarra, and R. Aunger, “Disgust as an Adaptive System for Disease Avoidance Behaviour,”
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
366 (2011): 389–401.
18
“a native touched with his finger some cold preserved meat …”:
Darwin,
Expression of the Emotions
, 255.
19
Thalia Wheatley and Jonathan Haidt hypnotized participants to feel a flash of disgust:
T. Wheatley and J. Haidt, “Hypnotic Disgust Makes Moral Judgments More Severe,”
Psychological Science
16 (2005): 780–84.
20
In other experiments, participants were asked to make judgments … after … a disgusting experience:
S. Schnall, J. Haidt, G. L. Clore, and A. H. Jordan, “Disgust as Embodied Moral Judgment,”
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
34 (2008): 1096–1109.
21
Even eating a bitter food, which evokes a sensation akin to physical disgust, makes people harsher:
K. Eskine, N. Kacinik, and J. Prinz, “A Bad Taste in the Mouth: Gustatory Disgust Influences Moral Judgment,”
Psychological Science
22 (2011): 295–99.
22
individuals with high disgust sensitivity have harsher attitudes toward certain other people:
G. Hodson and K. Costello, “Interpersonal Disgust, Ideological Orientations, and Dehumanization as Predictors of Intergroup Attitudes,”
Psychological Science
18 (2007): 691–98.
23
The mystery for moral psychologists … [is] why we should be so concerned with the sex that other people are having:
See also P. DeScioli and R. Kurzban, “Mysteries of Morality,”
Cognition
112 (2009): 281–99.
24
a recent poll:
L. Saad, “U.S. Acceptance of Gay/Lesbian Relations Is the New Normal,” May 14, 2012,
www.gallup.com/poll/154634/Acceptance-Gay-Lesbian-Relations-New-Normal.aspx
.
25
Jefferson proposed the following law:
Robert M. Pallitto,
Torture and State Violence in the United States: A Short Documentary History
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011).
26
“What, you would like to marry your sister?”:
Margaret Mead,
Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies
(New York: William Morrow, 1935), 79.
27
As the psychologist Steven Pinker points out:
Steven Pinker,
How the Mind Works
(New York: Norton, 1997).
28
Co-residence during childhood is one of the cues:
D. Lieberman, J. Tooby, and L. Cosmides, “Does Morality Have a Biological Basis? An Empirical Test of the Factors Governing Moral Sentiments Relating to Incest,”
Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
270 (2003): 819–26.
29
a stepfather who enters the family when the daughter is past a certain age:
Martin Daly and Margo Wilson,
The Truth About Cinderella
(London: Weidenfeld, 1998).
30
a well-known hypothetical:
J. Haidt, “The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment,”
Psychological Review
108 (2001): 814–34. See also Jonathan Haidt,
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
(New York: Pantheon, 2012).