But such stories don’t only exploit outrage and tribal humiliation for their power. Many deploy a third incendiary group emotion: disgust. In our evolutionary pasts, the threat from competing groups wouldn’t come only from their potential for violence. They could also be carrying dangerous pathogens that our immune systems hadn’t previously encountered and so couldn’t defend us against. Exposure to carriers of pathogens – in faeces, say, or rotten food – naturally activates feelings of disgust and revulsion. Our tribal brains seem to have developed the cultural tic of thinking of foreign
...more
