DISGUST evolved to protect people from disease or harm, not just anything socially unacceptable, according to the first quantitative study of its kind.
Researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine asked over 40,000 people to rate a series of paired photographs according to how disgusting they found each one. One image had suggestions of disease, such as a towel stained with what appeared to be reddish-yellow bodily fluids. Control images contained no such unsavoury suggestion, such as a towel with a blue stain. Significantly more people found the disease-related images more disgusting, according to the team led…
