Paul Rozin
speaker
44 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Paul Rozin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
There are enormous variations in disgust.
I'm a massive dog lover, but I would eat dog out of curiosity.
I've never eaten roadkill, but I would eat human flesh.
Medical students are disgusted by cadavers, but after they've dissected a cadaver, they're much less disgusted.
Nobody studied disgust 50 years ago. I did sort of start the modern interest in disgust. Darwin wrote about disgust quite a bit. That's Paul Rosen. R-O-Z-I-N. People call me Rosen, but that's not right.
Much of my work is about how humans relate to food from anthropological, evolutionary, and psychological perspectives.
You have people who have almost no disgust. They certainly wouldn't eat feces, but they're not really disgusted by seeing animal feces or something like that. And there are other people who will not blow their nose in a brand new piece of toilet paper.
I don't like really stinky cheese. Razin calls himself a partial vegetarian. I do not eat mammals or birds. However, I have a whole bunch of exceptions. For example, I will eat bacon. I will eat rejected food. So if someone's in a restaurant with me and they eat a hamburger and they only eat half of it, I in principle will eat it because it's going to go in the garbage.
I will eat calves' liver, which I love in the United States because it's a waste product. Nobody kills a calf for the liver.
I'm curious what it tastes like, whether I'd be disgusted by it. I don't think so, but I could be.
Well, we in the United States only eat muscle. In other countries, they eat liver, they eat a lot of the viscera. I don't terribly like eating brain, though I have eaten brain. It doesn't taste bad. I have eaten the ashes of one of my dear persons. That's the idea of endocannibalism. You love somebody, and if they die, you want to keep them, in some sense, in your body.
Whereas exocannibalism, which is very different, is eating your enemies.
I have no desire for that. But if a religion practiced it, I don't think any current major religion does. I would think that's OK.
Paul Rosin agrees. The core of disgust is almost certainly originally derived from a system to avoid pathogens, which are usually part of animal food, not plant food. And that's what led to his interest in disgust. What got me interested is that meat is the most favored food of humans that also causes the most tabooed food.
So I got curious why we should have such a strong negative emotion about a food that is highly nutritious and highly favored. Can you quickly define disgust for me? Disgust was originally defined as a rejection or offense at the oral incorporation of an offensive substance. We added to that definition the fact that that substance is usually contaminating.
That is, if it touches a otherwise desired food, it renders it inedible. So when a cockroach touches your sundae, that's the end of the sundae.
There are actually two disgust faces. One of them is a jaw drop, sometimes with the tongue sticking out, which is an oral rejection and maybe a closing of the nostrils. Okay. There's another one, which is primarily raising of the upper lip. And that overlaps a little with the anger expression.
That area is not as well-defined, and so there's a big discussion now in moral psychology of the extent to which disgust is really a moral emotion.
Well, that's the big issue, whether it's metaphorical use of disgust or it's actual disgust. And one critical issue there is whether the same brain area is involved, for which there is some evidence, and also whether some of the other features of disgust, even a little sense of nausea, is involved.
It does seem that when moral violations are called disgusting, they often have a bodily component to them, like an axe murderer, not a bank robber.
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