There’s a scene in Pixar’s Inside Out (2015) that gives a physical form to disgust. Throughout the movie, a young girl’s emotions are shown as characters inside her brain. At one point her father attempts to feed her broccoli, which the character of Disgust deems dangerous, instructing the girl’s brain to get rid of it. The young girl flicks the food away. “Well, I just saved our lives. You’re welcome,” Disgust gloats.

Disgust (the real life emotion) is a feeling of revulsion or disapproval triggered by something unpleasant.¹ Throughout history, the feeling has been associated with perceived danger—whether it’s safe to eat a moldy piece of meat, for example. In late 2021, The New York Times ran a longform on the topic with the grand but perhaps not totally misplaced title “How Disgust Explains Everything.” “[It is] a piece of evolutionary hardware designed to protect our stomachs that expanded into a system for protecting our souls,” wrote author Molly Young. “[It] shapes our behavior, our technology, our relationships. It is the reason we wear deodorant, use the bathroom in private and wield forks instead of eating with our bare hands.”

Young is particularly interested in the work of the academic Paul Rozin, who started studying the subject in the 1980s, looking first at disgust as a response to food, then as an unwanted reminder that we are animals (in terms of excretion, blood, sex and death, for example) and eventually as a social response. “Liberals say that conservatives are disgusting. Conservatives say that welfare cheaters are disgusting,” one of Rozin’s students, Jonathan Haidt, wrote in a co-authored paper with Rozin and two others in 1997. 

But a recent study claims that disgust—especially when associated with germs—can be overcome. Researchers at Concordia University in Canada and the University of New South Wales in Australia looked into whether they could train a group of people with “high levels of concern about contamination” to engage in two disgusting tasks: touching a dead cockroach and drinking out of an unused urine sample container. Their findings showed that participants who read a text that encouraged them to consider the feeling of disgust as normal, harmless and temporary alongside thoughts such as “I can deal with disgusting things” had lower levels of disgust afterward. Participants who read how unlikely it is that their fears would come to fruition also felt less disgusted. “There has actually been a study conducted where a cockroach and a human finger touched the same dirty kitchen floor . . . the human finger produced several times the amount of bacteria the cockroach did,” one of the texts read. 

One thing all the research on the topic shows is that disgust isn’t an emotion we need to get rid of, but it’s also worth reminding ourselves that most of the outcomes and concerns that we imagine as a result of it are unlikely to happen.