WHAT IF. . .Religon or Politics don't shape our sensibilities?

[Foxfyre]

Another thread for our USMB philosophers, sociologists, and psychotheory enthusiasts.

A long but interesting essay in the Boston Globe today explores why certain things repel us while other things do not.

It explores such interesting concepts as arsenic on your dinner plate can kill you and you might view it with alarm, but not feel disgust. A dog turd on your dinner plate, however, will not kill you or perhaps even harm you, but you feel strong revulsion and disgust.

The writer suggests that many of our views and preferences might in fact not be prejudice or bias or bigotry born of religion, politics, or inductive reasoning, but rather something much more inate and inexplicably human.

If this is true, what does it say about our condemnation of prejudice, bigotry, and/or discrimination re certain social phenomena?

Excerpt

What if our moral judgments are driven. . . .by more visceral human considerations? And what if one of those is not divine commandment or inductive reasoning, but simply whether a situation, in some small way, makes us feel like throwing up?

This is the argument that some behavioral scientists have begun to make: That a significant slice of morality can be explained by our innate feelings of disgust. A growing number of provocative and clever studies appear to show that disgust has the power to shape our moral judgments.

Research has shown that people who are more easily disgusted by bugs are more likely to see gay marriage and abortion as wrong. Putting people in a foul-smelling room makes them stricter judges of a controversial film or of a person who doesn’t return a lost wallet. Washing their hands makes people feel less guilty about their own moral transgressions, and hypnotically priming them to feel disgust reliably induces them to see wrongdoing in utterly innocuous stories.

Today, psychologists and philosophers are piecing these findings together into a theory of disgust’s moral role and the evolutionary forces that determined it: Just as our teeth and tongue first evolved to process food, then were enlisted for complex communication, disgust first arose as an emotional response to ensure that our ancestors steered clear of rancid meat and contagion. But over time, that response was co-opted by the social brain to help police the boundaries of acceptable behavior. Today, some psychologists argue, we recoil at the wrong just as we do at the rancid, and when someone says that a politician’s chronic dishonesty makes her sick, she is feeling the same revulsion she might get from a brimming plate of cockroaches.

“Disgust was probably the most underappreciated moral emotion, the most unstudied one,” says Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist at the University of Virginia. “It’s become politically much more relevant since the culture wars of the 1990s, and so within the broader renaissance of moral psychology disgust has been a particularly hot topic.”

Psychologists like Haidt are leading a wave of research into the so-called moral emotions — not just disgust, but others like anger and compassion — and the role those feelings play in how we form moral codes and apply them in our daily lives. A few, like Haidt, go so far as to claim that all the world’s moral systems can best be characterized not by what their adherents believe, but what emotions they rely on.

 

[uscitizen]

Now we get to one of the secrets of Fox's success.

 

[Foxfyre]

DEAR MOD assigned to monitor this thread:

Could you kindly repair the RELIGION in the thread title? There's a missing g and i. Thanks.

 

[lizzie]

Great subject and interesting read.

I suspect some of the findings are solid, and I also believe that early childhood experiences play into it as well. I know that people, long before they reach the age of any kind of reasoning, will form strong likes, dislikes, and opinions regarding the "goodness" and "badness" of things, and I believe this has alot to do with personal interractions between parents (primarily mothers) and their babies/small children.
One of the things that has always gotten under my skin a little is when I see people proclaim that one should not judge. The very act of survival requires that we make judgements every day of our lives.

 

[Big Black Dog]

Whenever my sensibilities seem to be a little out of whack, the wife slaps me a couple of times briskly around the head and ears and all of a sudden I tend to be quite sensible. This only happens a couple of times a year and for some reason, it always happens on a Tuesday.

 

[Foxfyre]

at Count. Just Tuesdays huh? Hmmm.

I honestly don't know what to think about the essay Lizzie. I was raised in a very racist society and I am not. One of my associates that I have gotten to know well was raised by gay parents in a largely gay community and admits to being somewhat homophobic. Why on both counts?

I can't remember ever being taught that it was wrong to eat horses and dogs and cats, but the idea of doing so is repulsive to me. Yet in many societies, that is quite culturally acceptable. How did Americans almost universally agree that was disgusting?

Actually I'm hoping the essay is one of those fluff pieces without much substance. Otherwise I'm going to have to rethink a lot of stuff. For instance, I have always believed that racism was almost universally a learned condition. But if we go with the writer's theory, it could be inate meaning that we will never be rid of it.

Interesting concept for sure though.

 

[uscitizen]

this links into the study of whiney children growing up to be conservatives?

 

[lizzie]

I honestly don't know what to think about the essay Lizzie. I was raised in a very racist society and I am not. One of my associates that I have gotten to know well was raised by gay parents in a largely gay community and admits to being somewhat homophobic. Why on both counts?

It's difficult to say for sure, and I don't necessarily believe that all the conclusions in the essay are accurate, but I do suspect that they are at least legitimate factors. Overall, they probably can be taken into account, but I tend to believe that early parent/child interactions are better indicators, and any of these factors can be overcome. As an example, my mother was afraid of all snakes, and hated bugs. I, otoh, love snakes and bugs, but I had to make a concerted effort to change my way of thinking since these fears were instilled in me so early in life. There's also the possibility that some of our innate fears and dislikes are actually a part of human genetic tendency, passed down over thousands and thousands of years of lineage.

Actually I'm hoping the essay is one of those fluff pieces without much substance. Otherwise I'm going to have to rethink a lot of stuff. For instance, I have always believed that racism was almost universally a learned condition. But if we go with the writer's theory, it could be inate meaning that we will never be rid of it.

Interesting concept for sure though.

My personal thoughts on racism is that it will never be completely eliminated until we are so homogenous that there are no more distinct racial characteristics or cultural traits.

 

[uscitizen]

My personal thoughts on racism is that it will never be completely eliminated until we are so homogenous that there are no more distinct racial characteristics or cultural traits.
//

I feel that we will find something else. Shape of earlobe, color of eyes, etc.

 

[Foxfyre]

I'm probably a bit more jaded than you guys are. I don't think racism is inate because I don't see it in young children. I think there will be racism as long as there is profit in it. Remove the profit factor, and I think the color of skin will become as unimportant as ear lobe shape or eye color.

 

[lizzie]

I'm probably a bit more jaded than you guys are. I don't think racism is inate because I don't see it in young children. I think there will be racism as long as there is profit in it. Remove the profit factor, and I think the color of skin will become as unimportant as ear lobe shape or eye color.

I don't think it's innate- I think it is primarily learned by experience, and subject to change throughout one's lifetime, depending on one's understanding and ability to see past the superficial elements of individuals. There was an interesting study done quite some time back where small black children were given a black doll and a white one, and were asked to name which one looked the most like them. If I remember correctly, the white doll was overwhelmingly the one they identified with. I don't remember if the study gave reasons for what were believed to be the reasons, but I found it a little disturbing, and I really felt ambivalent, and a little sad about what it was saying.