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away with murder but they would get away with a trail of rude, selfish, and antisocial acts, often oblivious to their own violations. Gossip extends our moral-emotional toolkit. In a gossipy world, we don’t just feel vengeance and gratitude toward those who hurt or help us; we feel pale but still instructive flashes of contempt and anger toward people whom we might not even know. We feel vicarious shame and embarrassment when we hear about people whose schemes, lusts, and private failings are exposed. Gossip is a policeman and a teacher. Without it, there would be chaos and ignorance.22
Many species reciprocate, but only humans gossip, and much of what we gossip about is the value of other people as partners for reciprocal relationships.
Gossip and reputation make sure that what goes around comes around—a person who is cruel will find that others are cruel back to him, and a person who is kind will find that other others are kind in return.
Cialdini describes six principles that salespeople use against us, but the most basic of all is reciprocity.
The Krishnas grew wealthy by exploiting people’s reciprocity reflexes—until everyone learned about the Krishnas and found ways to avoid taking the “gift” in the first place.
Reciprocity works just as well for bargaining.
Concession leads to concession.
people who stake out an extreme first position and then move toward the middle end up doing better than those who state a more reasonable first position and then hold fast.27
So the next time a salesman gives you a free gift or consultation, or makes a concession of any sort, duck. Don’t let him press your reciprocity button. The best way out, Cialdini advises, is to fight reciprocity with reciprocity. If you can reappraise the salesman’s move for what it is—an effort to exploit you—you’ll feel entitled to exploit him right back. Accept the gift or concession with a feeling of victory—you are exploiting an exploiter—not mindless obligation.
Reciprocity is an all-purpose relationship tonic.
With contempt you don’t need to right the wrong (as with anger) or flee the scene (as with fear or disgust). And best of all, contempt is made to share.
The two biggest causes of evil are two that we think are good, and that we try to encourage in our children: high self-esteem and moral idealism.
Moral codes are designed to keep order within society; they urge us to rein in our desires and play our assigned roles.
When I began to study morality, I read the moral codes of many cultures, and the first thing I learned is that most cultures are very concerned about food, sex, menstruation, and the handling of corpses.
But as I read further, I began to discern an underlying logic: the logic of disgust.
According to the leading theory of disgust in the 1980s, by Paul Rozin,7 disgust is largely about animals and the products of animal bodies (few plants or inorganic materials are disgusting), and disgusting things are contagious by touch.
When I went to talk to Rozin about the possible role of disgust in morality and religion, I found that he had been thinking about the same question.
Disgust has its evolutionary origins in helping people decide what to eat.
If a poisonous berry brushes up against your baked potato, it won’t make the potato harmful or disgusting.
Disgust was originally shaped by natural selection as a guardian of the mouth: It gave an advantage to individuals who went beyond the sensory properties of a potentially edible object (does it smell good?) and thought about where it came from and what it had touched.
Disgust extinguishes desire (hunger) and motivates purifying behaviors such as washing or, if it’s too late, vomiting.
disgust turns off desire and motivates concerns about purification, separation, and cleansing.
Disgust also gives us a queasy feeling when we see people with skin lesions, deformities, amputations, extreme obesity or thinness, and other violations of the culturally ideal outer envelope of the human body.
Disgust makes us careful about contact.
But the most fascinating thing about disgust is that it is recruited to support so many of the norms, rituals, and beliefs that cultures use to define themselves.
Biological processes must be carried out in the right way, and disgust is a guardian of that rightness.
You would feel disgust at this “savage” behavior and know, viscerally, that there was something wrong with these people.
Disgust is the guardian of the temple of the body.
If the human body is a temple that sometimes gets dirty, it makes sense that “cleanliness is next to Godliness.”
But if you do live in a three-dimensional world, then disgust is like Jacob’s ladder: It is rooted in the earth, in our biological necessities, but it leads or guides people toward heaven—or, at least, toward something felt to be, somehow, “up.”
To prepare, I read everything I could about Hinduism and the anthropology of purity and pollution, including The Laws of Manu,16 a guidebook for Brahmin men (the priestly caste) written in the first or second century. Manu tells Brahmins how to live, eat, pray, and interact with other people while still attending to what Cotton Mather called their “natural necessities.”
This passage is extraordinary because it lists every category of disgust that Rozin, McCauley, and I had studied: food, body products, animals, sex, death, body envelope violations, and hygiene.
Divinity and disgust must be kept separate at all times.
The interviews I conducted helped me to see a little better. My goal was to find out whether purity and pollution were really just about keeping biological “necessities” separate from divinity, or whether these practices had a deeper relationship to virtue and morality.
But many of the people I interviewed took a broader view and saw purity and pollution practices as means to an end: spiritual and moral advancement, or moving up on the third dimension.
If you know that you have divinity in you, you will act accordingly: You will treat people well, and you will treat your body as a temple.
Yet, once I had learned to see in three dimensions, I saw glimmers of divinity scattered all about. I began to feel disgust for the American practice of marching around one’s own house—even one’s bedroom—wearing the same shoes that, minutes earlier, had walked through city streets.
I noticed that people often spoke about morality using a language of “higher” and “lower.”
In my academic work, I discovered that the ethic of divinity had been central to public discourse in the United States until the time of the World War I, after which it began to fade (except in a few places, such as the American South—which also maintained racial segregation practices based on notions of physical purity).
But as science, technology, and the industrial age progressed, the Western world became “desacralized.”
The borders between the sacred and the profane must be carefully guarded, and that’s what rules of purity and pollution are all about.
committing myself to the cult of Jefferson, I read a collection of his letters. There I found a full and perfect description of the emotion I had just begun thinking about.
the genetic evolution of the emotion of disgust made it possible (but not inevitable) for cultures to develop caste systems based on occupation and supported by disgust toward those who perform “polluting” activities.
