---
title: Disgust
url: https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/disgust/
description: 'Disgust is the emotion of rejection: it makes people want to avoid, expel or stay clean of something.'
section: Learn
---

![Illustration: a split dossier collage contrasting a 1950s intelligence briefing room with an analog newsroom monitoring wall.](https://propagandaarchive.org/static/generated/hero-then-and-now.jpg)

[Learn](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/) · Emotion and fear

# Disgust

In brief

Disgust makes people reject what seems contaminating, and propaganda has long cast opponents as vermin or disease; self-reported disgust sensitivity is linked to social conservatism, but several dramatic claims about disgust and politics have not replicated.

On this page

- [In brief](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/disgust/#in-brief)
- [What the research shows](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/disgust/#what-the-research-shows)
- [Has it held up?](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/disgust/#has-it-held-up)
- [How it shows up in political messaging](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/disgust/#how-it-shows-up-in-political-messaging)
- [How to spot it](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/disgust/#how-to-spot-it)
- [Persuasion or manipulation?](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/disgust/#persuasion-or-manipulation)
- [Archive techniques that lean on this](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/disgust/#archive-techniques-that-lean-on-this)
- [Related topics](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/disgust/#related-topics)
- [Sources](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/disgust/#sources)
- [Images](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/disgust/#images)

On this page

*Area: [Emotion and fear](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/emotion-and-fear/) · Evidence:**mixed**([How we rate the evidence](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/evidence-ratings/)). The link between self-reported disgust sensitivity and social conservatism is well replicated; claims that incidental disgust sways moral judgment, or that bodily disgust reactions predict ideology, have largely not held up.*

## In brief

Disgust is the emotion of rejection: it makes people want to avoid, expel or stay clean of something. It evolved around food and disease but extends to people and behavior seen as contaminating. Propaganda has used it for centuries by portraying opponents as vermin, filth or disease. Research finds that people differ in how easily they are disgusted and that this difference is linked to political attitudes, but several of the most striking claims about disgust and politics have failed to replicate.

## What the research shows

Paul Rozin and April Fallon's 1987 account defined core disgust as revulsion at the prospect of taking something offensive into the body, driven by the idea of contamination: that brief contact with something disgusting makes an object disgusting too [1]. Later work by Rozin, Jonathan Haidt and Clark McCauley traced how the emotion expands from food and bodily products to death, sexual behavior, hygiene and finally to moral violations and to other people [2]. Haidt, McCauley and Rozin also built a questionnaire, the Disgust Scale, which measures how easily a person is disgusted across these domains [3].

Using such scales, Yoel Inbar, David Pizarro and Paul Bloom reported in 2009 that people who are more easily disgusted tend to be more politically conservative, especially on issues tied to purity and sexuality, such as abortion and same-sex marriage [4]. Inbar, Pizarro, Ravi Iyer and Haidt later confirmed the association in large online samples and found that disgust sensitivity predicted votes in the 2008 US presidential election [5]. A 2013 meta-analysis by John Terrizzi, Natalie Shook and Michael McDaniel pooled studies on disgust and other disease-avoidance tendencies (sometimes called the "behavioral immune system") and found a reliable positive association with social conservatism [6].

Disgust is also closely tied to dehumanization, the perception of other people as less than fully human. In a brain-imaging study, Lasana Harris and Susan Fiske showed participants photographs of groups that people commonly rate with disgust, such as homeless people and people addicted to drugs [7]. These images failed to activate a brain region (the medial prefrontal cortex) that responded to pictures of other social groups and is associated with thinking about other people's minds. Erin Buckels and Paul Trapnell found that inducing disgust increased the tendency to associate an out-group with animals, and that people higher in disgust sensitivity dehumanized more [8]. See [Dehumanization](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/dehumanization/) for the wider research.

## Has it held up?

The results split into three tiers.

**Holding up:** the correlation between self-reported disgust sensitivity and social conservatism has been found repeatedly and survives meta-analysis [4][5][6]. It is modest in size, varies across countries and samples, and is strongest for social and sexual issues rather than economic ones.

**Weak:** a popular idea held that feeling disgusted by something unrelated (a bad smell, a dirty desk) makes moral judgments harsher. Justin Landy and Geoffrey Goodwin's 2015 meta-analysis found only a small average effect of such incidental disgust on moral judgment, and it was no longer reliably different from zero after they corrected for publication bias, the tendency for positive results to be published and null results to be filed away [9].

**Not holding up:** a 2011 study by Kevin Smith and colleagues reported that people's physiological reactions to disgusting images (skin conductance, a measure of arousal) predicted their political attitudes [10]. A larger replication effort by Mathias Osmundsen, Michael Bang Petersen and colleagues, including Smith, did not find that physiological reactivity to disgusting images predicted ideology, even though self-reported disgust did [11]. A parallel set of preregistered replications by Bert Bakker, Gijs Schumacher, Claire Gothreau and Kevin Arceneaux found that liberals and conservatives had similar physiological responses to threatening images, contradicting an influential 2008 finding [12]. The self-report link between disgust and politics stands; the claim that it is visible in the body does not, on current evidence.

## How it shows up in political messaging

Disgust propaganda has been produced by regimes of the left and right, by democracies at war and by genocidal movements. David Livingstone Smith's history of dehumanization documents how consistently enemies are cast as vermin, parasites and disease [13].

- **Soviet Russia, 1917.** In an essay written weeks after the October Revolution, Lenin called for "purging" the Russian land of harmful insects, naming class enemies as fleas and bedbugs [14].

**Content note:** Soviet poster of a giant louse that calls defeated White Army commanders 'parasites', with dead soldiers pictured. This object is shown as it was published. [Why](https://propagandaarchive.org/about/#as-it-was) ![Soviet public-health poster of 1921 showing a giant louse above people washing clothes](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/images/psych-disgust-soviet-typhus-louse-poster-1921.jpg)

*Soviet public-health poster, Moscow, 1921 (artist unknown): a giant louse above people washing clothes, under the text "The Red Army crushed the White Guard parasites, Yudenich, Denikin, Kolchak. A new misfortune has come upon it: the typhus louse. Comrades! Fight infection! Destroy the louse!" Source: [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Red_army_against_typhoid_louse_Soviet_poster_1921.jpg). Public domain (published before 1931).*

- **Nazi Germany, 1940.** The film *Der ewige Jude* (The Eternal Jew) intercut images of Jewish people with footage of swarming rats, a sequence meant to present an entire people as a spreading infestation [13].
- **United States, Second World War.** American wartime media often depicted the Japanese as vermin; the historian John Dower documents, among many examples, a 1945 US Marine Corps magazine cartoon portraying the Japanese as lice to be exterminated [15].
- **Rwanda, 1990s.** The radio station RTLM and the newspaper *Kangura* repeatedly called Tutsi *inyenzi* (cockroaches). The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda cited this language in convicting the outlets' leaders of incitement to genocide [16].
- **Public health, 2014.** Governments also use disgust in health messaging. The FDA's anti-smoking spot [The Real Cost — "Your Skin"](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/real-cost-your-skin-2014/) shows a teenager's skin peeling away, pairing a documented harm with bodily revulsion.

![US poster Kill the Rat! showing a large rat among grain](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/images/psych-disgust-kill-the-rat-1918.jpg)

*"Kill the Rat!," US Food Administration poster (issued with the US Department of Agriculture, Bureau of Biological Survey), c. 1917–1919: a rat among spilled grain and the words "filthy and dangerous." US National Archives, NARA 512723. Source: [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%22Kill_The_Rat..._The_Most_Destructive_and_Dangerous_of_Animal_Pests..._Poison_Rats._Trap_Rats._Never_let_one_go...%22_-_NARA_-_512723.jpg). Public domain (US government work, published before 1931).*

![US wartime venereal-disease poster of a smiling young woman](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/images/she-may-look-clean-but-1943.jpg)

*"She May Look Clean—But," US wartime venereal-disease poster, 1943. From the FRAME gallery: [She May Look Clean—But](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/she-may-look-clean-but-1943/)*

## How to spot it

- A group of people is described with words for pests, parasites, disease, filth or contamination.
- Images link a person or group to rats, insects, sewage or infection.
- The message talks about "cleaning up," "purging" or "infestation" when referring to people.
- Vivid physical revulsion is doing the work that evidence would normally do.
- The issue is framed as purity versus pollution, so that compromise feels like contamination.

## Persuasion or manipulation?

Disgust can be honestly used when it is attached to a real, documented harm and the reader is told what the harm actually is, as in health messages about tobacco or food safety. It tips into manipulation, and in its worst forms into incitement, when it is attached to people rather than acts: when a group is described as vermin or disease, the message invites the audience to stop treating its members as people whose claims deserve a hearing. A useful test for any writer is whether the disgusting image describes something someone did, with evidence, or something someone is.

## Archive techniques that lean on this

- [Name-calling](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/name-calling/) — Name-calling: vermin and disease labels are among the oldest and most dangerous forms.
- [Scapegoating](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/scapegoating/) — Scapegoating: disgust helps turn a group into a source of contamination to be removed.

## Related topics

- [Dehumanization](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/dehumanization/) — Dehumanization
- [Moral foundations](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/moral-foundations/) — Moral foundations
- [Moral outrage](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/moral-outrage/) — Moral outrage
- [Out-group homogeneity](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/out-group-homogeneity/) — Out-group homogeneity
- [Fear messaging](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/fear-messaging/) — Fear messaging

## Sources

1. Rozin, P., & Fallon, A. E. (1987). A perspective on disgust. *Psychological Review*, 94(1), 23–41. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.94.1.23
2. Rozin, P., Haidt, J., & McCauley, C. R. (2008). Disgust. In M. Lewis, J. M. Haviland-Jones, & L. F. Barrett (Eds.), *Handbook of emotions* (3rd ed., pp. 757–776). Guilford Press.
3. Haidt, J., McCauley, C., & Rozin, P. (1994). Individual differences in sensitivity to disgust: A scale sampling seven domains of disgust elicitors. *Personality and Individual Differences*, 16(5), 701–713.
4. Inbar, Y., Pizarro, D. A., & Bloom, P. (2009). Conservatives are more easily disgusted than liberals. *Cognition and Emotion*, 23(4), 714–725. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699930802110007
5. Inbar, Y., Pizarro, D., Iyer, R., & Haidt, J. (2012). Disgust sensitivity, political conservatism, and voting. *Social Psychological and Personality Science*, 3(5), 537–544.
6. Terrizzi, J. A., Jr., Shook, N. J., & McDaniel, M. A. (2013). The behavioral immune system and social conservatism: A meta-analysis. *Evolution and Human Behavior*, 34(2), 99–108.
7. Harris, L. T., & Fiske, S. T. (2006). Dehumanizing the lowest of the low: Neuroimaging responses to extreme out-groups. *Psychological Science*, 17(10), 847–853. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01793.x
8. Buckels, E. E., & Trapnell, P. D. (2013). Disgust facilitates outgroup dehumanization. *Group Processes & Intergroup Relations*, 16(6), 771–780.
9. Landy, J. F., & Goodwin, G. P. (2015). Does incidental disgust amplify moral judgment? A meta-analytic review of experimental evidence. *Perspectives on Psychological Science*, 10(4), 518–536. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691615583128
10. Smith, K. B., Oxley, D., Hibbing, M. V., Alford, J. R., & Hibbing, J. R. (2011). Disgust sensitivity and the neurophysiology of left-right political orientations. *PLoS ONE*, 6(10), e25552. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0025552
11. Osmundsen, M., Hendry, D. J., Laustsen, L., Smith, K. B., & Petersen, M. B. (2022). The psychophysiology of political ideology: Replications, reanalyses, and recommendations. *The Journal of Politics*, 84(1).
12. Bakker, B. N., Schumacher, G., Gothreau, C., & Arceneaux, K. (2020). Conservatives and liberals have similar physiological responses to threats. *Nature Human Behaviour*, 4(6), 613–621.
13. Smith, D. L. (2011). *Less than human: Why we demean, enslave, and exterminate others*. St. Martin's Press.
14. Lenin, V. I. (1917/1964). How to organise competition? In *Collected works* (Vol. 26). Progress Publishers.
15. Dower, J. W. (1986). *War without mercy: Race and power in the Pacific War*. Pantheon Books.
16. International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. (2003, December 3). *The Prosecutor v. Ferdinand Nahimana, Jean-Bosco Barayagwiza and Hassan Ngeze* (Case No. ICTR-99-52-T), Judgement and Sentence.

## Images

| Image | Source | Licence |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Soviet typhus-louse poster, 1921 | [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Red_army_against_typhoid_louse_Soviet_poster_1921.jpg), Moscow, artist unknown | Public domain (published before 1931) |
| "Kill the Rat!," c. 1917–1919 | [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%22Kill_The_Rat..._The_Most_Destructive_and_Dangerous_of_Animal_Pests..._Poison_Rats._Trap_Rats._Never_let_one_go...%22_-_NARA_-_512723.jpg), US Food Administration / USDA; NARA 512723 | Public domain (US government work, before 1931) |
| She May Look Clean—But, 1943 | FRAME gallery, [She May Look Clean—But](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/she-may-look-clean-but-1943/) (provenance in the entry) | See entry |

### Image gaps

- *Der ewige Jude* (1940) poster and film stills, *Kangura* covers with the *inyenzi* label, and the 1945 US Marine Corps magazine cartoon: copyright status not verified as open (the Commons poster file's public-domain claim was not accepted for a 1940 work by a director who died in 2002); not hosted. The 2014 FDA "Your Skin" frame is in the archive gallery as [The Real Cost — "Your Skin"](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/real-cost-your-skin-2014/).

## Techniques

[Name-calling](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/name-calling/) [Scapegoating](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/scapegoating/)

## Related

- [Dehumanization](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/dehumanization/)
- [Moral foundations](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/moral-foundations/)
- [Moral outrage](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/moral-outrage/)
- [Out-group homogeneity](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/out-group-homogeneity/)
- [Fear messaging](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/fear-messaging/)
- [Affect heuristic](https://propagandaarchive.org/learn/affect-heuristic/)
- [Name-calling](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/name-calling/)
- [Scapegoating](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/scapegoating/)
- [Fear appeal](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/fear-appeal/)