Stigmatocortex: Disgust, Discrimination & Dehumanization

[In Editing Mode: will be updated by the end of the month]

Before we have any conversation about disgust, discrimination or dehumanization, first and foremost, the concepts of biases needs to be addressed. Specifically about biases when it comes to our behaviors towards people we consider as in-group and people we consider as out-group. We all possess a degree of cognitive biases. And yes, they do vary from our behaviors with respect to in-group and out-group. But the biases that I'm more interested in is the implicit bias. So we have a category of biases called as explicit bias which involves some degree of conscious awareness that people are discriminating against other people. Whereas there are these other biases called as implicit biases which are either subliminal or unconscious biases.

Here the decision making is often influenced by beliefs, patterns, basically things that we are not aware of. For example, if we take up the airplane accidents that happened in the last year in 2025. So what's happening here is that because we had an exposure a greater than average exposure to airplane mishaps that the brain decided that oh this is happening quite a lot. We getting a loaded amount of information about this and it's pretty frequent. So maybe it's happening a lot more which caused us to develop an availability bias when it came to information as opposed to relying on statistics.

There is another kind of bias called as the confirmation bias. Here the brain's tendency is to believe or accept the information that already agrees with existing belief systems. Let's take out the example of learning styles. Today in approximately 29 out of 39 that's about 72% of higher education institutions in the United States have been teaching the learning style theory. Despite there being no scientific evidence to support personalized learning styles, we still have people that believe that there exists such things as learning styles. That people can be either visual learners or perhaps auditory learners. But there is no statistics. there are no uh scientific evidences to back up that claim. So that happens to be confirmation bias.

We have anchoring bias. Anchoring bias is where one tends to cling on to the first impressions of somebody and just run with that impression for future references. We also have a hindsight bias. Let's say you're looking upon the events of the past and given the knowledge of whatever has happened sitting in the future, you think that the outcome was predetermined. It was so obvious that that it was so obvious that that outcome would have achieved. So an example here would be in sports we often hear people mention I knew they were going to win the game. This was right after they won the game. So these are what I would call as implicit biases. So when we talk about us versus them, this behavior is surprisingly pretty universal amongst human beings. In fact, it so happens to even exist amongst our closest relatives, including the baboons and the chimpanzees. uh but our aggression towards the themms uh it did not exist the way it does today. In fact, there are some studies that suggest to the idea that we used to exhibit a lot more in-group aggression as opposed to out-group aggressions. That is to say, we were exhibiting violent tendencies towards people within our groups as opposed to people outside our groups. Here I must ask you a question.

Why is it that when someone opens fire on your enemies, he is termed as a hero? And is sometimes even awarded by the country! Let's suppose that someone were to open fire at the citizens of the same country he belongs to. Or maybe let's go a little bit further and say he were to open fire on your own people or your own groups. Now he's considered as a murderer or a terrorist. So this really calls for us to question whether we are biased towards who is committing the same atrocities, who is committing the same behavior, who is acting upon a violent action and getting away with it, and towards whom. And while we are at it, let's also wonder about why quite often, our perceptions of the perpetrators of aggression happens to be gendered? Why is it that when we talk about aggression and and violence per se, it accompanies the pronouns, "he/him"?

In-group or outgroup behavior is only possible when a person gains knowledge about themselves, their identity and conforms to a social identity. If said social identity did not to get constructed, there's a high possibility that the individual may not be participating in in-group versus out-group behaviors. Which brings me to the reasoning as to why are some species more dispositioned to creating said in-groups and out-groups. At this point, I must my older talks on the Vomeronasal (VNO) organ. The Vomeronasal organ also known as the Jacobson's organ is the organ that is involved in processing pheromones. As seen in the picture, the VNO elicits a Flehmen's response when the animal has had a good sniff of pheromones. Now within the human body, we do not possess this Vomeronasal organ. It s either completely absent or the genes are dormant (aka non functional) or the neurons that link the receptors that bind to the pheromones, to the brain are absent. And I'm going to talk about that in detail, shortly.

So we are more predispositioned to create in-groups or out-groups through a different mechanism. You see the flehmen's response, the Jacobson's organ and the pherommones are not only for mating activities. They are also used to identify predators or prey. And more importantly, they were also used to identify who was a member of your social group and who was not. In many species, this Vomeronasal organ was relied upon to assess whether or not the animal you are you're trying to mate with happens to be your sibling or your cousin or your child. It was to recognize who was family and who wasn't. Now why is that important? You see because of the presence of the Vomeronasal organ, it was easier to establish kinship because a kin would display certain pheromones which was easily recognizable by the members of that said kin. And since animals have a kinship-based social organization, it was very easy to adopt the Vomeronasal organ which already existed for a similar procedure in identifying your kin.

However, due to the lack of the Vomeronasal organ being present, humans began creating something called as the pseudo-kinships. Here due to the absence of the Vomeronasal organ we can be easily manipulated by abstract ideas, metaphors, non-existing theories, and even dog-whistle politics which relies on dehumanizing individuals by labelling them cockroaches or aliens to elicit a disgust response. We can be easily manipulated by any of these varieties of abstractions that categorize people as our in-groups and our out-groups. So which brings the question:

If we are able to be easily manipulated, then is a disgust response innate or a learned behavior? More importantly is that a universal behavior?

Traditionally, when we talk about disgust we talk about it from a physiological manner.. Now, physiologically, when you eat something foul or when you drink something or when you smell something rotten, if that said food or drink item tends to be in any shape or form, harmful to your body, your body is going to react by puking, coiling the stomach or releasing bile, so as to prevent you from ingesting that substance. The idea was to keep you safe from threats that can easily kill you. At some point in our evolution, humans have developed this idea of social disgust where the same physiological pathway is recruited to recognize social threats like people who speak a different language, people who are of a different religion, people who may have a different skin color, people who veil their hair, people who wear a burkha, people who dress differently, people who are vaccinated, people of a different political belief, and the list goes on.

We identify these things as social threats and that identification happens at a very young age when we are taught that said behaviors are threatening to the existence of the social groups that we belong to and in order to maintain the said membership into that particular group, we are told to adopt the "appropriate" disgust response towards the socially-classified out-groups. So yes, while we do have an innate core discussed response, there also exists a social disgust as learned behaviors. Regarding universality, the disgust response does exist across human beings, but whether or not people get triggered by the same social threat is different. In your culture maybe eating insects is considered foul but in several cultures insects happen to be the greatest source of protein. So members of that culture may not be exhibit the same disgust response as you.

I'll give you another example and I'm going to give you a personal example this time. For my entire life, I have thought that I had an allergy to fish, eggs, and yogurt. And I did get myself checked up about a year ago where I found that I don't have any allergies. So none of the allergens resulted in a response. And it got me thinking, why is it that I am still puking or having a disgust response when I smell eggs, fish, or yogurt? Maybe, growing up in an environment where consuming animals was thought of being morally wrong — that we weren't giving them respect by eating them — impacted my perception of the food on my table. In fact, I do remember at a very young age that some of the members of my family were visibly showing disgust responses to certain food items, which I believe could have contributed to my selective disgust response to eggs, fish and yoghurt. Today I am in a position where I can unlearn and relearn my responses towards food. The process of removing societally constructed expectations from my life and reconstructing a significantly different identity than what was socially acceptable for me to embody while growing up abled me today, to eat seafood without eliciting a disgust response!

So that's an example of a societally conditioned disgust responses. The first thing to notice here is to look at whether or not this is a learned behavior. Is the learned behavior learned because of social expectations or is it learned because of certain moral ideologies we uphold or is the behavior of disgust innate? Which brings me to the idea of benign masochism — that perhaps there are certain behaviors that we indulge in on a daily basis that generate a pleasurable sensation. These may include indulging in horror movies or liking sad movies or eating spicy foods or getting veggies. Amongst our kinks and fetishes especially involving degradation, humiliation, fluids and scat and gore, there happens to be a lot of disgust response, discrimination and dehumanization built into it but at the same time it is accompanied by a pleasurable response that outweighs the said negative disgust response. So when we look at benign masochism, the question here is for that particular individual, is indulging in said behavior, considered disruptive morally, socially or physiologically and does it amount to some pain or an uncomfortable sensation and/or does that individual gain pleasure from it? So if all of these boxes do check, then perhaps this person could be exhibiting benign masochism.

I'll give you an example here. While we do say that eating spicy food is considered benign masochism, my question here is to push back on that and ask for whom? Who is the test subject here? Quite at times when we do psychological and sociological research we often have about 96% of the research being done only on 12% of the world's population who happen to be white. Their responses being taken as the normative upon which human behavior or assumptions about human behavior is being built upon. If you were to take all of that into consideration, if let's say only 12% of the world's population is white, then 88% of the world's population ingests spicy food on a regular basis. For them, it may not be even considered spicy. They could call it flavorful food for in their culture they are just mixing different spices to create a flavor consistency that they are used to ingesting on a regular basis. If said 88% of the population of the world is indulging in spicy food. My question here is isn't eating spicy food considered normal? If yes, then why is eating spicy food considered benign masochism given that the only group of population involved in that said research happened to be of the Global Minority — white, from W.E.I.R.D (Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich and Democratic) societies which is only 12% of the world's population —how do they define what is normal and as an extension of which what is kinky? So that's my pushback on generalization.

To continue the conversation about biases and disgust, it is very important for us to understand what we mean by aggression. The questions here are whether humans are the only ones who exhibit aggression towards their own species, towards their own groups. And the answer is no. They're not the only ones. Aggression exists across the animal kingdom. The leading cause of death amongst male baboons are other male baboons. The leading cause of death amongst male impalas specifically during mating seasons are other male impalas. So we are not the only species that kills their own. In fact, we are not the only ones to show behaviors like premeditated murder. Which brings me to our cousins chimpanzees. There have been several studies that have been done on Chimpanzee social organization.

Note that in the chimpanzee family systems it is the females that leave the family upon puberty. They immigrate out of the family and go into a different family. So the male–male social bonding amongst the chimpanzees are extremely high. They exhibit a lot of pro-social behavior. Due to this social bonding amongst male chimpanzees, we see chimps regularly organizing border patrols. They are tasked with identifying the neighboring chimpanzee territories, their boundaries and regularly inspect those territories. Quite often you will see them going out and committing a premeditated genocide against neighboring chimpanzees. If you are able to kill all the males of the neighboring chimpanzee locality then you can expand your own territory.

So, we are not the only species that exhibit aggression. We are not the only species that exhibit group violence. We are also not the only species that exhibit genocidal behaviors. Are we the only species to understand whether or not systems of oppression and systems in general are built fairly or not? Are we able to identify that? And if we are not the only ones, then are there other animals out there who can also understand the concept of fairness and justice? Here's a TED talk from the primatologist Frans de Waal who has experimented with capuchin monkeys to look at whether or not they're able to feel empathy, and develop a moral identity.

Which brings us to the question of oppression and societal positioning. Does aggression increase as you go up the social ladder of dominance? Let's compare a rhesus monkey to a patas monkey. The alpha males of rhesus monkeys often require support from low-ranking individuals and the females to maintain their position. So the system of dominance here was bottom-up-dominance. One can go so far as to call social organization of rhesus monkeys as egalitarian.

For patas in the wild, it was hypothesized that they had completely eradicated male-male violence. However, if you were to put them in captivity, it would take them a very short time to be at each other's throats to kill each other. You see, patas monkeys are nomadic in nature and they rarely meet other males of the group, so never get an opportunity to engage in such violent behavior.

I wonder, in what ways is human aggression different from animals? Amongst humans the aggression does not have to be physical. It can be extremely passive. It can be sarcasm. It can be in the form of a praise. It can be signing a form, casting a vote, looking the other way, giving to charity. And we are also one of the only species to mix up aggression and violence with pleasure. The sadomasochistic behaviors we exhibit, are rarely found in animals. When Roe v. Wade was being introduced, it so happened that violent crimes drastically decreased. The evidence can be found in a paper by Jonathan Donahoo and Steven Levit. The states with an increase in abortion rates happen to have the lowest crime rates. So after Roe v. Wade was legalized in 1973, by 1990s violent crime was in steady decline. One can argue that because there was a decrease in unwanted babies, early life trauma and poverty could be controlled. If you have lived through to trauma and poverty, there could be a decrease in prefrontal cortex development and an increase in glucocorticoids which results in a disruption of neuronal development and metabolic activity. So by about five years of age, one's socioeconomic states can predict resting glucocorticoid levels and prefrontal cortex thickening which highlights an early impact of social inequality on brain development. I'd like to add here that it's not just living a life of trauma or poverty that impacts one's developmental biology. It's also having access to social structures or people that one can rely on in early life that plays a higher role in whether or not exposure to trauma or poverty impacts one's development.

Let's say, you are an unwanted child in a poverty rich environment, the chances of you finding a support system is very low. But if you are a child that the people opted to have and did not opt for an abortion in this scenario, then the chances of you being exposed to a very good support network would have been higher. Make note that this does not mean that if you had a stable economic base, you had access to support systems and that there has been no emotional, physical, mental or sexual childhood trauma.

Let's transition into testosterone. Testosterone does not cause aggression. Testosterone only amplifies society learned aggression. What do I mean by that? If let's say you have been prone and brought up in a society that says you need to defend your status or your social standing by exhibiting aggressive behaviors, then your testosterone is going to amplify said aggressive behaviors. If your society has taught you to defend your status by I don't know donating to charity then the testosterone is going to amplify how

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much donations are you going to make to charity in order to defend your social standing. I'll give you some more examples here. If if your society has taught you to defend your social status by wearing as much of gold, gold earrings, gold necklaces, gold bangles and gold anklets, as much of gold as possible during social functions like weddings, then testosterone is going to amplify that behavior. If your society has taught you to defend your social status by bragging about the number of cars you have and having each member of

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your family arrive at a function in a different car, testosterone is going to amplify the number of times you're going to indulge in that behavior. If let's say your society has taught you to defend your social status by downplaying your achievements. Let's say you've become a CEO of a multinational company and everyone has come over to congratulate you. But your society has taught you no the only way for you to the only way for you to defend your social status is by downplaying your

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achievements by saying oh it's okay it's nothing. It's it's it's all God's mercy. then you are more likely to indulge in that behavior even if you yourself are an atheist. Which brings me to the runaway trolley problem which many of us have actually had had the exposure to. So, the problem begins with a trolley at the top of the hill that just doesn't seem to stop. It is on its way down. And on one end of the hill, you have five individuals standing below. They are

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stuck. They cannot move. And on the other path over here, you have one individual standing there. And that's by that's you by the Libra. So, if you had the choice to switch the trolley from running over five people to running over one person, what would you do? Would you move the lever? Would you switch the trolley? What would you do? Many a times when this question is asked, people respond with, "Well, killing one person is better than killing five people." It's 1/5if of the bad outcome. The needs

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of the many outweigh the needs of the few. And some respond with, "Well, why do we need to pull the lever at all? Why can't we just don't engage? If we are not going to pull the lever, then we may not be contributing to any murder. We are just letting them die. So there is no right or wrong answer here. Uh the question is a moral question and it does bring up a lot of reasons as to why people might choose to act in a particular manner. I've also heard individuals mention, well, who are you to pull the lever?

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Why you? So, there are a lot of follow-up questions that come with this problem. The reason why I bring this up is it's very important for us to understand the next video. This hormone oxytocin. Now, oxytocin is officially, to sort of use endocrine jargon, it's officially the grooviest hormone on earth because oxytocin is by now famous. It causes bonding between mothers and infants and pair bonding between monogous couples and it makes you more expressive and emotionally sensitive and more

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cooperative and more charitable and more trusting. And there's a whole new horrifying field of neuroscience called neuromarketing where if you spritz oxytocin up people's noses, they're more likely to believe all sorts of gibberish and nonsense of people trying to sell you stuff, whether it's their political viewpoint or some geek. I mean, if they could spray oxytocin through the vents in like Costco all over this country, what that would do to the economy of like sort of the nonsense that people

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would buy. Okay, so oxytocin promotes pro-social behavior until you look more closely. And what recent work shows is that's exactly what oxytocin does. It makes you much more cooperative and generous and charitable and all of that with people who you categorize as being just like you. It makes you more pro-social towards inroup members. And when it comes to outgroup members, it makes people more xenophobic and more preemptively aggressive and less cooperative. And the greatest study showing this was a couple years ago, and

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this was a group in the Netherlands where they got their usual sort of lab rats, which was college volunteers from some like university there. And what they did was they gave everyone this standard classic problem in philosophy, the runaway trolley problem. Is it okay to sacrifice one person, push them in front of a runaway trolley to save five? And there's a whole world of research done on that. So they sort of established the baseline levels at which people would be willing to push somebody

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to save five. Now what they did was they gave the person they were pushing onto the track a name. [snorts] A third of the time the person would get a name that apparently is just like your stereotypical Dutch name, Dirk or Peter or something like that. a third of the time or the remainder of the time either of the two groups that people in Holland tend to have a lot of outgroup hostility towards Germans, oh that's right, World War II or people with Muslim names. So now you've got the scenario, do you push

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Durk in front of the trolley? Do you push Otto in front of the trolley? Do you push Mahammud in front of the trolley? And what they show is give people oxytocin and they're less likely to sacrifice dirt. Whereas they can't leap fast enough to push Wolf Gang and Hammud there under the tracks. Oxytocin doesn't make us nicer. It makes us nicer to people we're already predisposed towards being nice to. It exaggerates us them. Contrast. >> Yes. So oxytocin promotes pro-social behaviors towards people whom we already

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categorize as inroups. However, it causes us to be extremely aggressive to people whom we categorize as outroups. Which brings me to serotonin. We rarely speak about serotonin, but serotonin is involved in impulsive behavior, specifically in impulsive aggression. It's often called the in the- moment outbursts, the sudden ones. However, it is not a premeditated violence. So around 2002 of Shalom Kaspi found a variance in the gene for monomine oxidities that's called mao and the variant was

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called ma oa the oversimplified view of this was that ma oa is a warrior gene uh it is genetic ine inevitability that someone would end up with the M A gene. And why is that necessary? Why do they call it the warrior gene and all of that? Well, you see, MAO AA uh is a variant of an enzyme that degrades serotonin. Now, originally, what will happen is that if your serotonin is low, you would be exhibiting a lot more impulsive aggression behaviors. However, if the enzyme that degrades serotonin is low, then there is a

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serotonin buildup in the environment. Now, the question is if that serotonin buildup in the environment is going to increase aggression or decrease aggression, which brings me to the two types of varants. You get the low activity variant which is M A L and the high activity variant which is M A O A H. So the AO A well here we see a decrease in enzyme speed even the production of enzymes is extremely low and so what happens to the serotonin is that it is not fully broken down and serotonin often ends up pooling and collecting

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around synapses. The aggression paradox here is that while decrease in serotonin increases aggression, an extremely high chronic serotonin environment can cause hypersensitization of the brain which can increase impulsive aggression. But it only does that if one is exposed to this flood of serotonin during brain development. The high activity variant however that is m a o a h here you see that the enzyme speed is extremely high that the effect on serotonin is also very very quick. The enzyme causes serotonin to

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degrade rapidly and the sudden drop in serotonin causes mood dips. It causes depression and anxiety. Now the warrior gene hypothesis is that once ma was termed as the warrior gene in several clinical proceedings people were given a reduced sentence. Why? Because the lawyers argued that the said warrior gene is well it's not their fault that they behaved in this particular manner. They're genetically indisposed to behave that way and it was in inevitable for them to behave that way and they possess a warrior gene.

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Well, today that hypothesis has been disproven and uh warrior gene analogy is going out of trend which I hope it does faster. But it's important for you to note here that serotonin does increase impulsivity. Yes. But there are a lot of processes involved in acting upon that impulsure. Uh before I get into that, even if someone has a genetic variant, there involves a lot of uh you need to have the right environment for that genetic variant to express itself to create that said hypothesis that this person is behaving

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impulsively. Why? Because of this genetic variant. Quite a times we don't get that environment for the genes to express itself. It could be an epigenetic situation. It could be that the gene just happens to be dormant or it could be that the gene is tagged with something and cannot be visible or there is some deformity in the ribosome and you can't really uh transcribe the gene. Or it could also be along the lines of perhaps the social environment was positive for the child to grow up in and

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hence there weren't these stressors that would cause this gene to activate and express itself. So irrespective of whether or not someone has a gene, it does not automatically mean that you're going to express the gene and that you're automatically going to express the behavior attached uh or the reasoning provided for the behavior attached to the gene. So following this whole theory basically there were a lot of these researchers that came out that said okay if you knock out tryptophan a precursor to the

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production of serotonin maybe that can solve the case or if you knock out uh the tryptophan hydroxilase maybe the aggression will go down and yeah there was no such result but again remember there is a lot more happening from serotonin release to someone behaving in an aggressive fashion. There involves a lot more processes that needs to happen here. >> We have evolved to have delayed maturation of the frontal because if the frontal cortex's job is going to be to make you to do the harder

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thing when it's the right thing to do, it's really challenging learning what counts as the right thing. You got to learn your society's hypocrisies. You've got to learn your society's rationale and lies and thou shalt not kill. But if you kill one of them, we're going to give you a medal and vote for you and maybe like preferentially mate with you. It takes a long time to learn this stuff. And we have a longer delayed frontal cortical maturation than any other primate. And this is a recent

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evolutionary invention. [music] Let's frame it this way. Your frontal cortex has evolved. The genes that specify your frontal cortex have evolved to make you as free from genes as possible. Your frontal cortex is the part of your brain that is the freest from genetic influences [music] because it's still being sculpted by environment and experience a quarter century after you plopped out there. Whereas most of the rest of your brain is sculpted by two or three years worth of experience.

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Our genes evolved to free our frontal cortex from strict genetic determinism and to make it much more sculpted by environmental determinism. >> Which of course brings me to amydala. Well, amydala is not a fierce center. It is however a novelty processing station relevance and importance detector. So if you have a signal that's going up to your amydala, whether or not that stimulus is potentially important, whether or not it is new, it is emotional, it is a salient stimulus, all of that is important in order for an

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amydala activation. Once let's say the amydala has said, "Oh, okay, the stimulus is salient. Now it is evaluated whether based on past experiences whether said novel stimulus is a threat or not. If it is a threat then the amydala sends a negative response. If it is not it sends a neutral or a positive response. Some other things to note here other than amydala being a novelty and irrelevance detector that is heavily influenced by the past is that the anterior singulate cortex is also quite

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often involved in processing. You have emotional and social context processing going on in the ACC. In the insula you tend to distinguish between us versus them. You have an internal body state or a self-awareness about who you are. Prefrontal cortex is often involved in decision making, in moral decisions, in complex behaviors. Uh temporal loes are involved in [clears throat] memory and learning. So let's look at amygdala further. Amyda can be categorized as basolateral or central amygdala. The central amydala is

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the ancient processes. uh it involves primal fears, fear of spiders, fear of uh snakes. Uh the basalateral amydala is quite often involved in uh learned behaviors, learned fears. and it has evolved very recently. So it often integrates things with social context. In a scenario where someone might be exhibiting PTSD symptoms, uh the amygdala networks uh make new connections causing the structure to uh expand drastically. And the one thing we should note here is that gluccocorticoids which is also

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involved uh which also includes cortisol uh causes this expansion of the amydala and simultaneously the same gluccocorticoids is involved in a reduction in the hypocample region causing a shrinking effect and one of the interesting syndromes here is the Williams syndrome uh it's a development disorder where people exhibit hyper socialability and impaired responses to fear and anger [clears throat] but at the same time they show hyperactivity in amygdala to nonsocial threats such as snakes. Some other circuits that u

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that amydala is involved with is the glossateral prefrontal cortex. This often is trying to provide a rational input to the amydala. Uh we also have the eyes to the phalamus to the visual cortex but that takes a lot of time. So sometimes there exists a phalamic shortcut with said sensory information goes to the amydala faster and this often occurs when the phalamus already knows that oh whatever you're looking at is terrifying and needs a quicker response from the amydala. Amydala also has output networks to the ventromedial

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prefrontal cortex to the eyes. Eyes is important because it is the amygdala that decides where are you supposed to look, what information are you supposed to gather. Uh there are output networks to the basal ganglia. Here you find rapid signals that uh go through uh especially to the motor cortex uh specifically if you were to respond by let's say slapping someone or you know creating an uh creating a motor response that way and you also have an output signal going to the hypoc campus which brings me to the insula cortex and

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the anterior singulate cortex. The insula has is often involved in processing disgust signals. It is activated both for disgusting taste and smell as well as moral disgust. Now moral disgust is often the response that we encounter to outgroup members. Uh but it's but it's very very interesting because you see an overlap of uh of what kind of uh processes that the brain region can be doing. And here it highlights the brain's ability to use metaphorical interpretations to reference both physical sensations and

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the abstract concepts. uh anterior singulate cortex uh has a lot of trouble distinguishing between your physical pain and the empathic pain of someone else's suffering. While exposure to foul odors impacts people's moral judgment and social behavior, cleanliness is often associated with self-p perceived notions of moral purity. An important note here is the Lady McBth effect. Now, Lady McBth effect is this unconscious desire for physical cleansing after engaging in and reflecting upon morally questionable

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actions. And there have been studies done on this where people have recently reflected on their moral transgressions. And these are the people who are more likely to choose hands and wipes over other gifts. Strangely speaking, if there was someone in need uh before this individual has had the opportunity to actually go and cleanse themselves, if there was someone in need, then this person who has just recently reflected upon their moral transgressions would be the first one to lend a helping hand. But if the person

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uh has already cleansed themselves by going for a bath or by washing their hands, then they are less likely to offer a helping hand. So you will often see experiments wherein people would be asked before they are cleansing themselves to uh fill in the blanks. If you were given Wash SH, what letter would you put in there? or if you were given the letters S dash dash P, what letters would be put in there? And quite often if people have not cleansed themselves, they're more likely to put wash and soap uh to fill

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in these uh letters. But if they have washed themselves, the likelihood that they're not going to put in. And again, here is yet another example of a weird uh data set that this experiment was done on predominantly western, educated, industrial, rich and democratic population. So it would be useful to see if this applies across populations or is this something that is applicable only to one demographic. So is morality felt first or is it thought first? In other words, is it processed through the cortical system or

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the limbic system? Now it was originally thought that morality is driven by reasoning and not by emotions. However, there has been several studies, especially this one that is highlighted here by Jonathan Hyde on moral psychology uh who noted that emotional areas were the first ones in the brain to light up uh before any cortical involvement. So the emotional or the lyic system was the one to activate before cortical system could activate. So we are often feeling first before any rational thought comes

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in uh during a moral judgment. So it's very interesting that people still would consider that oh we are moral we are rational individuals. Well those two statements don't really add up. Quite often we will also hear people say I I can't tell you why but when those people do that it's wrong. And then they'll go back and they'll think about it and they'll come back and say, "Well, I've thought about it and I will tell you why I think that way." And you will often

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see rationalization occurring uh long after said behavior was indulged in such moral decision was been made. And people don't it's it's very it's very interesting to see that people often provide rationalization for their moral judgments even though the moral judgment has happened through the emotional systems first which brings me to disgust again. Here's a clip from Inside Out. [music] >> Here we go. All right. Open. >> H. This looks new. >> Think it's safe.

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>> What is it? >> Okay. Caution. There is a dangerous smell, people. Hold on. What is that? >> This is disgust. She basically keeps Riley from being poisoned physically and socially. >> That is not brightly colored or shaped like a dinosaur. Hold on, guys. It's broccoli. >> Yucky. Well, I just saved our lives. Yeah. You're welcome. >> Riley, if you don't eat your dinner, you're not going to get any dessert. Wait, did he just say we couldn't have

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dessert? >> That's anger. He cares very deeply about things being fair. >> So, that's how you WANT TO PLAY IT, OLD MAN. No dessert? Oh, sure. We'll eat our dinner right after you eat this. [music] >> Right. Here comes an airplane. >> Oh, airplane. We got an airplane, everybody. I absolutely love this movie because they do explain it beautifully. Here are some experiments I'm going to highlight from the field of discuss research. The first one here suggests

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that if you put someone in a room and have them take a political test to assess their ideologies, what would happen? And let's say at some given time point when they are inside the room, you introduce a garbage smell. The insula cortex activates in probably one/tenth of a second. there is a gustatory disgust response that is detected. Uh it is often about getting rid of life-threatening toxins and eventually this gustatory disgust at some point becomes moral disgust because your brain cannot differentiate between

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the two and that get rid of life-threatening toxins become social toxins. So the social views uh or the moral views that you look at at this point, this individual could probably be responding in a completely different manner. If they are exposed to this garbage smell while taking the uh while taking the test, they're more likely to respond socially conservative. However, it is important to look at what kind of questions are you talking about. So there is no effect on economic views or any geopolitical views. However,

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there is an impact on social politics. So what are social views? It can look at things from skincare routines to food consumption to a culture's definition of afterlife or any of these things can actually be influenced by visceral disgust. The second experiment we are looking into the anterior single chinus. Let's say you're watching someone being poked by a needle. Your anterior singlet cortex checks for context. Is the pain that is generated dangerous or not? Let's say we poke someone you

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love with a needle. Then your anterior singulate cortex will activate and help you feel and contextualize someone else's pain as your own. When you look under the hood, your neurons don't differentiate between your pain or someone else's pain. The same experiment when it was done uh there has been videos of hands being poked with needles that was shown to several individuals. And yes, the anterior singulate cortex does activate in the viewers's minds. But if you show clips of different hands

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belonging to people with different skin tones, then the anterior singular cortex only activates if that person identifies with the person whose hand is on the video. In 2012, there was a study that wanted to investigate the research gap, specifically the gap which showed a mixed evidence on what type of disgust can be linked to conservatism. Some of these studies found that contamination disgust has the strongest links to conservatism and others found that core bill disgust is the strongest. Now this study took about 31,000

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participants across 121 countries and they measured three types of disgust using a disgust scale uh that they had devised. the key finding was that the contamination discussed that is fear of germs or disease is most strongly linked to conservatism and this held across 121 countries that were studied. The mechanism that they try to explain is that disgust has evolved to avoid out groups with novel pathogens. That out groups with different social practices could equally be disease risk. Now these out groups who had these

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perceived disease risk resulted in the political conservatism that they found that discussed sensitivity predicts voting behaviors for conservative candidates. In 2015, a study decided to look into the research gap specifically about racial prejudices affecting neural processing of disgust and that the neural circuits linking discuss sensitivity and implicit racial biases were not established. So the study design looked at 26 Chinese participants and they took the implicit association test along with an fMRI uh

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to look at passive viewing of inroup and outgroup discussed faces and they measured this discussed sensitivity the implicit prejudice scores and functional connectivity of the insula with the amygdala and the anterior singulate cortex. The key findings here were that the outgroup discussed faces triggered a higher activation in the right insula and amygdala than the inroup discussed faces. So which resulted in this functional coupling the connection between insula and adulla was positively correlated

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with prejudice and the connection between insula and anterior singulate cortex was negatively correlated with prejudice. Now the mechanism that they were trying to explain is that the insula acts as the hub linking sensory disgust processes to emotion circuits involved in amygdala and to regulatory circuits involved in the anterior singulate cortex. And this higher disgust sensitivity implied that there was a stronger biased perception of out group faces as threatening or as contaminating. So these findings supported that discuss

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sensitivity contributes to racial prejudice via specific neural pathways and it's suggested that well interventions might target these regulatory circuits like anterior single cortex to reduce the prejudice related bias. Here's another study from 2018. And for this study, it is important for us to first categorize certain acronyms that are being used. B OS refers to body order disgust sensitivity. Rwa refers to right-wing authoritarianism. SDO refers to social dominance orientation. So what was the study trying to do? They

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knew that there was previous studies showing mixed evidence on what type of discuss links to conservatism and it was unclear whether body order discussed sensitivity predicts authoritarianism uniquely and the study design involved around 201 participants which were 99 Asian, 86 white, 10 black and five latinex participants mainly mechanical turk workers. there were three correlational studies done using the boards and the RWA scales. RWA if you remember is the right-wing authoritarianism. So the key finding was that higher

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boards that is higher body order discuss sensitivity strongly predicts higher authoritarianism [snorts] and that RWA that is right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation positively correlated towards Trump. They proposed a dual process framework wherein they said there was a different motivation for authoritarianism and social dominance orientation. And that is to say authoritarianism motivation arises from perception of social threat described by the metaphor of the world as a dangerous

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place and leads to this upholding of the social order and tradition. And on contrast, the SDO perception that is the social dominance orientation or perception of the world is a competitive jungle where it is justified to step on the others to get ahead. Which brings me to this politics of racist dehumanization. And it quite often utilizes something called as dog whistle politics. To dehumanize an out group, uh you need to use derogatory terms. You need to invoke a primal disgust response to call your opponents

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as pigs or as cockroaches or as chamar or as doi or harajin. All of these are offensive terminologies. And because they're so closely linked to discussed responses that you can actually utilize that to gain more coverage in your conservative ideologies to garner more support for conservative politics. So this is my uh painting of what it looks like to have a political party that predominantly utilizes dog whistles. So dog whistle if you remember is a whistle that a human being can barely hear. But apparently the uh uh

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the pitch of that whistle is so fine-tuned and high that the dogs cannot resist and they can come to you. They'll do whatever they want in order to ensure that they are not going to hear that whistle again. In some cases, it is also termed as a very uh that the whistle is extremely high and it might be painful for the dogs. In other situations, dog whistles are often used in training to ensure that the dogs comply. These terms that we often see, which are derogatory terms, are often being combined with uh

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with tropes that society uses as subscription models. that if you were to behave in this manner and if you were to uh be pro-establishment or be pro-conservative then you are a nationalist that you are exhibiting nationalism whereas these other individuals who are being termed as cockroaches Indian chamar all these individuals that the chariot has to run them over splatter the blood around in order for the said nationalism to exist. And this nationalism also happens to be a subscription model of

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the society that if you do not comply to the rules and regulations of conservatism of the way in which the society is built on the backs of billionaires on the backs of certain uh money lenders who hold a lot more power amongst the political parties that if your politics or if your reflections do not match up with this then you could also be the one who gets termed as Inensi, who gets termed as Chamar, who gets termed as Knoxel and cockroaches. Knal and cockroaches actually did happen in India very recently where people have

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been called Knox and cockroach for being anti-government. So these are quite often terms that we will see used as dog whistle politics by predominantly conservative uh parties in order to establish a control upon the population to use the discussed responses against their own people and to establish an in-group outgroup behavior such that said conservative political parties can benefit from it. Here is an example of how quickly during our developmental stages can babies exhibit morality. >> Is a human baby a purely amoral

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[clears throat] creature? just a blank slate who learns from society to respond with compassion to suffering and with outrage, unfairness, and injustice? Or is it possible that a baby understands right from wrong at the very start of his or her life? There's a growing body of scientific evidence to support the idea that perhaps some sense of good and evil is bread in the bone. I am Paul Bloom, a psychology professor at Yale University, and I'm part of a team exploring the moral life of babies.

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>> We're here at Yale University's Infant Cognition Center. Um, this center researches what infants know about their physical worlds and their social worlds and has been doing so for about the last 10 years. >> So, my work here as a graduate student is what infants understand about people as good people and bad people. whether a young infant before they're being taught about these kinds of concepts could make distinctions like these. All right. So, we'll have you sit right here with

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her and then just scooter all the way up to the front of the table there. We run puppet shows in the lab. >> I need to do something fun now. Okay. >> They are either hand puppets or little wooden shapes in which one character plays the role of the good guy and another character plays the role of the bad guy. Close the curtain. One puppet tries but fails to get to the top of the hill, sort of struggling and and falling back down. On alternating trials, we show infants. One character

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who comes and bumps the climbing character up the hill and down goes the curtain. If you're ready, up goes the curtain. On another trial, we have a character who comes and bumps the character down the hill. Down goes the curtain and up goes the curtain. And infants see that interaction sort of over and over again between six and 14 times. After they're sort of finished looking at it, when they're nice and bored, we simply ask them to choose between the two characters. All right, great. So, we are all done

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with that part. We're just going to have her choose between the puppets now. That one. All right. Good job. That was the helpful guy, wasn't it? Astonishingly, really, we are finding that upwards of 80% of babies are choosing the character who was helpful over the character who was unhelpful. Okay, Ellie. >> All right, gorgeous. Can we have that ducky? Thank you. And goes the [clears throat] game. >> In another of our tests is a character who has a ball and he plays with his

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ball sort of happily and then he drops his ball to one side of the stage or another. at the back of the stage there are two characters, one of whom runs up when the ball goes over near him, grabs the ball and gives the ball back to the character who dropped it. On the other hand, the character on the other side of the stage, when he runs up, he grabs the ball and runs off stage with it. So, we are just going to have her choose between the puppets now. >> Hey, which one do you like? >> That guy. Okay.

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>> All right. That was the nice guy. I heard about the concept and I thought it was a really neat idea. We just like to participate in baby science. >> The girls really enjoy it. It's a lot of fun >> to improve our chances of becoming better parents. >> In another scenario, we show infants a character who tries but fails to open a box. Okay, gorgeous one. Up goes the curtain. Um, one character comes and helps him open the box after he struggles. And down goes the curtain. Up goes the

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curtain. Another character comes and jumps down on top of the [clears throat] box, preventing him from doing so. Okay, great. Now, we're just going to have her choose between the puppets. >> Hi. Which one do you like? That one. [clears throat] >> So, parents often ask us what it might mean that their baby seems to tell the difference between a nice guy and a mean guy. >> Um, that's the only question I would really have is, you know, how did my baby do? And one of the things I think

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it means is that we spend a lot of time worrying about teaching children the difference between good guys and bad guys in the world, good things and bad things, but that in fact these things might be something that infants just come to the world with. >> 50 years ago we didn't understand a lot of what we understand now, what we take for granted. >> [laughter] >> So maybe we do have an innate sense of right or wrong. But even at a very young age, babies are able to understand who are the humans

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around them that are helping them. especially when it comes to making their needs being met as opposed to who are the human beings who are not helping them and not helping out and getting their needs met. So it is while yes we may say that yes there is some amount of correlation that the babies are choosing individuals who are right who are helpful in nature and not individuals who are harming people or harming puppets or characters. uh and who are actively standing opposed to the character's uh role. But

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but it's harder to directly state from this that babies have an innate sense of right or wrong. Uh it's harder for us to do that. One considering you're looking at a non-verbal subject. Another is that all of this also boils down to researcher bias and bias and perceptions. And it becomes much much harder for us and becomes much much harder for us to substantially state that babies have an innate sense of wrongdoings and right doings. but yes, this study did show that at a very very young age, babies are able to

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categorize people or categorize characters as moral and immoral. Even though we have seen the babies decide what is moral or immoral just a video ago, uh does not mean that prejudice is not a learned behavior. So there are three models in acquiring prejudice and one is aversions to groups uh upon acquiring a fear conditioned response to a stimuli which is very often how the Pavlovian aversive conditioning looks like. The second is to predict that a particular pattern of behavior that is freezing anxiety,

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vigilance and avoidance. So you get into group anxiety which amplifies the implicit prejudice but not the implicit stereotyping. You also have a social learning and memory that forms because of said prejudice which brings me to the experiment three. Uh now this experiment has not been replicated successfully and people have failed several times in order to replicate this but this is an experiment that you will often find the minute you search for biases for perceptions of individuals. This is the first experiment that pops up on the

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internet search but yeah it's been largely disproven and cannot be replicated. So I wouldn't give it too much of credence but I will explain to you what the pres uh what the experiment is but I will not go into details about what's going on here or you can check that out on the internet. So the experiment was that someone walks into the elevator. They have some books or some papers and it keeps falling uh they're holding a cup of coffee and they ask you to hold the cup of coffee while

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they gather themselves, gather the books and papers. Then they thank you and take the coffee and leave. Now you enter an office and you are asked about questions about how would you rate the uh person's personality, the one that you just met. And would you rate them as warm or cold? So this particular experiment found that uh if you held a hot coffee for more than 15 seconds, you are more likely to rate the person as having a warm personality. But if you hold if you held an iced coffee, then you were more

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likely to rate them as having a cold personality. And they explained by saying that since the perception of personality in this context was asked on a thermal scale and the only inputs that was available was the data collected by thermal receptors then there is a chance that you might be relying on this precon pre-existing data even though the data type for personality did not exist and you just have a proxy that's available that is your thermal receptors data and You just go by that and you reply to the question

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that way. But yes, this study has been largely disproven. It cannot be replicated. It has been tried several times. So again, I wouldn't give it too much credence. Bringing me to the example four. If you have someone read the passage about a deadly new pathogen invading into their lives, they are going to be more hostile towards immigration into the US whether it is illegal or legal. So the threat of invasion here is weighing on you and all of this boils down to is are they us or are they them?

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And the one way to have the masses join you is by constantly associating them with identities that invoke discussed responses like aliens, cockroaches, um, insects, all of that. See, your brain is constantly improvising when it comes to thinking metaphorically and symbolically. Which brings me to the end of this presentation. Thank you so much for joining me for stigmata cortex neuroscience of disgust discrimination and dehumanization.