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David Pizarro - The Dark Side of Cleanliness
Being a human is complicated.
So, one of the things that complicates it is
that we feel as though we're eternal souls
and free floating minds,
but the reality is different.
We are mind and souls
and we are attached to bodies.
And having a body is complicated.
So while my mind feels like a mind of a 18-year-old,
everyday I look into the mirror and I realize my body is not 18 years old anymore.
And this poses problems:
having bodies means that we need to maintain them.
We have to actually take care of these bodies.
And so what do I mean by maintain them?
I mean we need to actually like you'd take care of a car,
there are a series of things you need to do
so that your body does not go to waste.
So, one of the things that we have to do
is keep our bodies clean and free of disease.
Luckily we have psychological mechanisms
that are dedicated to keeping our bodies maintained in this way.
And these mechanisms is what I study.
One of the things that I want to tell you about today
are the darker sides of these mechanisms.
That is the very thing that is so good for keeping our bodies clean
can actually have unintended negative consequences
for judgements and our behaviors.
So, we need to keep our bodies clean and free of disease.
We are petty good at this, we are motivated to do it.
We take showers, everyday hopefully,
we wash our hands, we brush our teeth.
We also want to convince others that we are clean
so we buy products that make us smell good and look nice,
so others think we are clean.
But keeping our bodies clean and free of disease,
more than just a decision about our own cleanliness,
we also want to avoid dirty-looking people
because they might be a source of contamination.
So, or say we have psychological mechanisms to tell us
we might want to stir clear of these people.
We might want to avoid people who would do things like play in the mud.
And we not only have to be aware of our own cleanliness
and the people we hang out with,
we also have to be aware of our environment.
We have to keep our environment clean so,
we do things like clean our bathroom,
wash our utensils,
clean our kitchens,
and we have help.
We have multi-billion-dollar-year industries
that are dedicated to selling us different kinds of soap for all of these things.
One soap for your body, one for your kitchen, one for your bathroom,
and so we do a fairly good job.
Now, it's not so problematic as it might seem.
We do a fairly good job of staying away from disease,
and one of the reasons we do so
is once we have been contaminated,
our body has a natural immune response
that is dedicated to try to kill the germs that have entered our body.
And so, for instance,
this allows us to on occasion to play in the mud, or shake the hand of a stranger, or even live in an university dormitory room
without having too negative of a consequence.
And we know that this immune system is important.
One very very striking way in which is important,
we can tell, is from people who are born with deficient immune systems
and so, on occasion there are people born
with essentially no immunity at all.
Take the case of David Vetter.
He was a child who in the 80's became very famous because he was born with such a serious immune deficiency
that he had to live in a bubble for most of his life.
Even the most benign germ
that entered his body would have killed him.
And in fact it did kill him when he was 13 years old.
But we have a first line of defense against contamination.
So before our immune system has to kick in,
we have a psychological immune system.
We have essentially, we create our own bubble
of protection against contamination.
And this is a very very powerful psychological mechanism.
So for instance is what keeps me very interested in doing things like
making sure I line my toilet when I use a public restroom,
get very nervous if there are none of these in the bathroom.
It also keeps us from eating things that might potentially have disease or be damaging,
like meat that may be infested with bugs.
So stay away from meat that might be dangerous to us because of contamination.
And in fact, the link with food is so strong
that we have an emotion, part of the psychological immune system,
is the emotion of disgust.
And disgust is something that I spent the last 10 years studying
it's a very very strong universal emotion.
So this is a classic picture of six basic emotions
and you'll recognize the emotion of disgust
as the one with the wrinkled nose.
This is such a strong emotion that no matter where you look in the world, you'll find it;
As you'll do these other emotions.
And you can see the origins of this emotion.
Even though young infants don't have a full disgust emotion like we do,
you can see the origins of disgust as protecting us against oral contamination,
by given a baby a bitter or sour taste.
So that same face that we make when I show you an image of rotten meat,
the baby makes when I, you give him lemon.
So, the origins of this protective emotion, disgust,
are thought to come, and the word "disgust" betrays this, are thought to come from
protection we have against ingesting potential poisons.
But this emotion in the psychological immune system, as powerful as it is
is rough.
Just like with all other emotions, sometimes it misfires.
And one potential negative consequence of this,
is that it causes us to make decisions that in the end are harmful for society.
So the very reason that we are so motivated to keep buying the right kind of soap,
and washing our hands, and carrying these little hand sanitizes...
That very thing has caused a string of germs and bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics.
And so the psychological immune system that is supposed to protect us from disease
has ironically caused certain diseases to arrise that wouldn't have otherwise.
In the same way, the psychological immune system that's meant to protect us,
can have negative and serious consequences for our judgements and decisions in the social domain.
And so what I want to share with you today,
is some research that's converging from very different strands and very different researchers
that's pointing to the same thing:
That the power of the psychological immune system can leak over into our judgements
and it can cause some very very ugly judgements and decisions in the social spirit.
So for instance,
boosting our psychological immune system,
seems to be linked to increased negative attitudes
towards immigrants, towards gay people, and just in general towards Humanity.
Such that the psychological immune system over firing
has some petty serious consequences associated.
How do we know this?
In general there are two strategies that we can use to study this.
One, we can look at the natural psychological immune response across the population.
So when I show you a disgusting picture of meat,
some of you may have really really made the disgust face
and some of you may not be bother at all.
In fact, some of you may have eaten that for breakfast.
And so we can actually measure this
and here is represented on the right by somebody who is very very easily disgusted
or very very sensitive to contamination environment.
And on the left the face of somebody who is not very easily disgusted at all.
And so we can measure this. How do we measure?
Well, some very very easy way to do so
is by asking people.
And so there are a variety of questionnaires.
Some that measure sensitivity to disease and contamination,
some that just measure disgust and how easily disgusted we are.
These are some of the questions that we use,
and you can answer this in your mind.
Imagine you have a 5-point scale
'very very agree' on the right, 1 means 'no agree at all'.
"I try to avoid letting any part of my body touch the toilet seat in a public rest room even when it appears clean";
"If I see someone vomit it makes me sick to my stomach";
"I prefer to wash my hands petty soon after shaking someone's hand";
"I have a story of susceptibility to infectious diseases".
And what you can find is that some people are very very,
have very strong psychological immune system and some people, they are not so bothered.
Is very different in a country where we kiss to greet very frequently
as opposed to countries where they don't even shake your hand.
Another way that we can measure this
or we can find the association between the psychological immune system and our social judgements,
is by actually - forget the individual diferences -
bring people into the lab and manipulate the psychological immune system: boost it.
Make people very very concerned with contamination or very disgusted
and compare that to a group of people who had not had their psychological immune system boosted.
Some sort of control group.
How do we do this?
You can bring people into the lab and remind them that germs are everywhere
so I can tell you: "remote controls have lots of germs, if you go to a hotel room there are germs everywhere,
in your seats right now the hand rest has been touched be thousands of people, you don't know what's there."
Or I can directly manipulate something like the disgust response
and I love studying disgust because is so easy to manipulate.
I can show you one picture.
This actually came from a friend's nose.
And I said "I have to use this" in my talk.
In fact I can tell some of you are more disgusted than others,
but by manipulating these images,
I can tell you "You know germs grow everywhere, in your kitchen, in your sponge.
You can't see it but here it is."
We can use this methods to make wonderful people be very very sensitive to contamination.
And what we find...
Let me tell you about one experiment from researchers at the University British Columbia.
They did this in fact, with half of the people who came into the study.
They told them "you know in your kitchen there are germs everywhere"
and the other half, they told them about car accidents happening all the time.
So it's another threat, it's just not one about contamination and disease.
And what they found when asking individuals at the University British Columbia
their attitudes about various things,
including immigration and attitudes towards immigrants,
the judgements of those people who had just read about germs
they were much harsher, they were much less in favor of immigration,
specially for countries in which the immigrants were substantially different from them.
So in this case they were African immigrants.
What they found was simply reminding people that germs are lurking,
makes them more opposed to immigration and harsher judges of immigrants.
In a series of studies that I have done with my colleagues at Cornell
we focused on the emotion of disgust
and how making people disgusted or finding people who are naturally easily disgusted,
how this influences their attitudes towards homosexuality.
And it turns out,
that both, for people,
for normally disgusted very easily, for the people who really really squirreled in their seat ,
when I showed the image of the dirty thing that had came off from the nose,
you are slightly more likely to be opposed to gay marriage.
So we can show this reliably, we've done it across large portions of individuals,
across the population, controlling for various things like education and religion.
Independent of all that,
just the degree to which you are easily disgusted by toilets or rotten meat
predicts your attitude towards homosexuality.
But we've also shown this by manipulating,
by bringing people again into the laboratory
and exposing some people to a disgusting smell.
So half of our participants were asked what they thought about a variety of social groups including gay men.
"How warmly or coldly do you feel about these social groups?"
Half of the participants did this, they filled up the questionnaire
when there was a smell in the room, a bad smell
and half of them did it when there wasn't a bad smell.
And what we find is that simply the presence of a bad smell
means that people are harsher in their evaluation of gay men.
Now, some of them didn't even realize that there was a bad smell until afterwards when we asked them:
"Did you smell it?"
"Oh, yeah! I didn't know what that was. I thought it was the Research Assistant"
And it was a very very bad smell of course.
One of the most reliable findings though, is that
boosting the psychological immune system makes us harsher judges,
particularly in the moral domain.
That is, when I'm feeling like there is threat of contamination around,
when I'm feeling disgusted,
I am much more likely to think that things are wrong.
Even things I might not normally think are morally wrong.
And I am much more likely to judge people harshly,
for practices and behaviors,
that might be slightly weird, or deviant, or different than mine.
Even when there is no harm involved.
So let me give you an example,
this is a study done by researchers at the University of Virginia.
What they asked people to do was make a series of judgements.
They read a vignette about person who did something that may have been wrong,
but there was no direct harm involved.
So in this case,
this is one example: a man's dog gets hit by a car, he's very sad.
His dog is dead, but he figures:
"You know, I'm not going to waste this perfectly good meat."
So he cooks his own dog and he eats it for dinner.
Was it morally wrong for him to do this?
What they found was:
The people who answered that question in front of a disgusting desk
- in this case they were answering this question and desk had a dirty tissue, it had an old pizza box, and a used drink -
they were much more likely to find this as a morally wrong action
than people who answered the question in front of a very clean desk.
In our own work,
we decided, well, is one thing to bring people into the laboratory and make them disgusted
that is a good method but it does not happen that often.
So we said, you know what does happen often, one thing that boosts the immune psychological system
is constantly being reminded that there is disease everywhere.
And we have a reminder, specially on college campuses,
where there are this hand-sanitizers stations everywhere,
and part of the message that we get constantly is with signs is:
"Stop the disease, stop the spread of Influenza. Clean your hands."
So we thought, is this enough to get people to be more punitive?
To be harsher moral judges?
And so what we did is we brought people into the lab,
and all we did, half of the participants,
were given a reminder:
"By the way, we do lots of experiments. Just make sure you clean your hands before you touch the keyboard."
And the other half received no such instructions.
And then we asked them a series of questions, this time it was in the *** domain.
As you can imagine disgust and cleanliness are very important - at least they should be to you - in the *** domain specially.
And so we asked them: "Do you think this would be morally wrong to do?"
So we ask them a series of questions, of harmless but weird *** acts.
One example is: "A man is watching his grand mother house,
and while his grand mother is away, he invites his girlfriend over and they have sex on the grand mother's bed."
Now, weird, gross, hmmm; yeah.
How wrong is it?
If they had just been reminded of cleaning their hands,
they were significantly more likely to think that this was a wrong act.
And this was asked across a number a actions and we find in general.
Being reminded to clean your hands, makes you, let's just say, more sexually conservative,
more likely to find that certain things are wrong in that particular domain.
This is a strong response.
Our psychology is built to keep us away from contamination, from disease,
from dirty things, dirty virus and dirty people.
I don't want you to leave thinking it's a shame that we have disgust
or it's a shame that we are motivated to stay away from dirty things.
Stay motivated to keep away from dirty things: it's a good thing.
But like much our psychology, a good thing can easily become bad.
It can lead to errors in judgement
that if we are not careful can have serious consequences.
So just like when I showed you this meat
and I told you that it might have been rotten meat.
What might at first have looked as maggots, like flies in the meat,
is actually just rice, and this is a recipe made to try to gross people up.
You can serve it to your kids.
Because we have the ability to reason about this,
we can correct for it.
We can say: "Oh, it looks kind of gross, but it might be good so I'll eat it anyway."
We can do that in the domain of food,
we can also do it in the social domain.
So just because somebody makes us queasy,
they might do things differently than us,
they might smell different than us, they might look different than us,
they might engage in *** practices different than us,
does not mean that we can sit and think and say:
"This is really wrong."
While I might have a gut reaction that it is:
"perhaps I should think twice about it".
In that way,
- ironically -
by opening ourselves to the fact that maybe our psychological immune response can be wrong,
we can have a healthier, happier society.
Thank you.
(Applause)