Find something morally sickening? Take a ginger pill
https://aeon.co/ideas/find-something-mor...inger-pill
EXCERPT: . . . Until recently, no research study had been able to figure out if the disgust felt upon encountering a morally troubling situation is what makes us decide that the situation is wrong. In fact, no study had even determined whether that feeling is real – whether, when we say we are disgusted by some morally reprehensible event, we mean it literally: we feel nauseous.
This gap in scientific knowledge led my former graduate student Conor Steckler to come up with a brilliant idea. As those prone to motion sickness might know, ginger root can reduce nausea. Steckler suggested we feed people ginger pills, then ask them to weigh in on morally questionable scenarios – behaviours such as peeing in a public pool, or buying a sex doll that looks like one’s receptionist. If people’s moral beliefs are wrapped up in their bodily sensations, then giving them a pill that reduces some of those sensations [...]
In my psychology lab at the University of British Columbia, we filled empty gel capsules with either ginger powder or sugar (for randomly assigned control participants); in a double-blind design, neither the participants nor the researchers running the study knew who received which pill. [...] Sure enough, as we reported in an article in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2019, we found the predicted difference. Those who ingested ginger decided that some of those violations, such as someone peeing in your swimming pool, were not so wrong after all. Blocking their nausea changed our participants’ moral beliefs.
Importantly, these effects didn’t emerge for all the moral dilemmas we presented. [...] In our studies, ginger had no effect on participants’ responses to highly severe infractions. Apparently, most people think it’s so obviously wrong to eat your own dog or sleep with a close relative that any disgust they might feel at these behaviours had no impact on their beliefs. ... In contrast, for the more ambiguous infractions – such as buying that sex doll or eating (totally clean!) faeces – people’s moral judgments were partly shaped by their disgust feelings.
We also found that ginger had no effect on people’s beliefs about other kinds of moral violations: those that involve harm to others, such as drinking and driving, or those that involve fairness, such as failing to tip a server. The violations that were affected by ginger, in contrast, centred on maintaining the purity of one’s own body. [...] According to the psychologist Jonathan Haidt and his colleagues, in many cultures this presumably adaptive tendency morphed into a broader ethic that uses concepts such as purity, sanctity and sin to discourage behaviours perceived to cause some manner of bodily degradation. In many cultures, these rules have stretched far beyond their original adaptive purposes...
[...] In fact, much of the socially proscribed moralisation of sanctity that occurs now is, itself, wrong. It is appropriate, and useful, for people to feel disgusted by spoiled foods, faeces, dead bodies and sibling sex. But that doesn’t mean that we should moralise these emotional responses. We don’t have to extend our beliefs about right and wrong to behaviours that don’t actually hurt others, even if we find them disgusting. The tendency to do so is an ancient evolutionary holdover and, with the help of modern sanitation and safe sex practices, it’s one we can afford to set aside.
Yet this kind of moralisation is manifested frequently in response to a number of behaviours that, to some, appear to tarnish the presumed purity of the human body. [...] Instead, many of us would prefer to hew to a set of moral standards that come from a coherent, rationally derived philosophy about enhancing justice and mitigating harms. Certain human behaviours do make us feel sick. But we need not rely on those feelings as a basis for our moral principles, or when judging others for what we feel to be immoral.
Before deciding that something is wrong, we might ask ourselves, is it just that I’m disgusted by it? Or, when encountering what appears to be a moral dilemma, we could play it safe and reach for a ginger ale... (MORE - details)
https://aeon.co/ideas/find-something-mor...inger-pill
EXCERPT: . . . Until recently, no research study had been able to figure out if the disgust felt upon encountering a morally troubling situation is what makes us decide that the situation is wrong. In fact, no study had even determined whether that feeling is real – whether, when we say we are disgusted by some morally reprehensible event, we mean it literally: we feel nauseous.
This gap in scientific knowledge led my former graduate student Conor Steckler to come up with a brilliant idea. As those prone to motion sickness might know, ginger root can reduce nausea. Steckler suggested we feed people ginger pills, then ask them to weigh in on morally questionable scenarios – behaviours such as peeing in a public pool, or buying a sex doll that looks like one’s receptionist. If people’s moral beliefs are wrapped up in their bodily sensations, then giving them a pill that reduces some of those sensations [...]
In my psychology lab at the University of British Columbia, we filled empty gel capsules with either ginger powder or sugar (for randomly assigned control participants); in a double-blind design, neither the participants nor the researchers running the study knew who received which pill. [...] Sure enough, as we reported in an article in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2019, we found the predicted difference. Those who ingested ginger decided that some of those violations, such as someone peeing in your swimming pool, were not so wrong after all. Blocking their nausea changed our participants’ moral beliefs.
Importantly, these effects didn’t emerge for all the moral dilemmas we presented. [...] In our studies, ginger had no effect on participants’ responses to highly severe infractions. Apparently, most people think it’s so obviously wrong to eat your own dog or sleep with a close relative that any disgust they might feel at these behaviours had no impact on their beliefs. ... In contrast, for the more ambiguous infractions – such as buying that sex doll or eating (totally clean!) faeces – people’s moral judgments were partly shaped by their disgust feelings.
We also found that ginger had no effect on people’s beliefs about other kinds of moral violations: those that involve harm to others, such as drinking and driving, or those that involve fairness, such as failing to tip a server. The violations that were affected by ginger, in contrast, centred on maintaining the purity of one’s own body. [...] According to the psychologist Jonathan Haidt and his colleagues, in many cultures this presumably adaptive tendency morphed into a broader ethic that uses concepts such as purity, sanctity and sin to discourage behaviours perceived to cause some manner of bodily degradation. In many cultures, these rules have stretched far beyond their original adaptive purposes...
[...] In fact, much of the socially proscribed moralisation of sanctity that occurs now is, itself, wrong. It is appropriate, and useful, for people to feel disgusted by spoiled foods, faeces, dead bodies and sibling sex. But that doesn’t mean that we should moralise these emotional responses. We don’t have to extend our beliefs about right and wrong to behaviours that don’t actually hurt others, even if we find them disgusting. The tendency to do so is an ancient evolutionary holdover and, with the help of modern sanitation and safe sex practices, it’s one we can afford to set aside.
Yet this kind of moralisation is manifested frequently in response to a number of behaviours that, to some, appear to tarnish the presumed purity of the human body. [...] Instead, many of us would prefer to hew to a set of moral standards that come from a coherent, rationally derived philosophy about enhancing justice and mitigating harms. Certain human behaviours do make us feel sick. But we need not rely on those feelings as a basis for our moral principles, or when judging others for what we feel to be immoral.
Before deciding that something is wrong, we might ask ourselves, is it just that I’m disgusted by it? Or, when encountering what appears to be a moral dilemma, we could play it safe and reach for a ginger ale... (MORE - details)