The Atheist's Taste Test

Posted by: Mike Pallante on August 2, 2011 at 10:45AM
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In 2010 Ryan S. Ritter publishedGross Gods and Icky Atheism: Disgust Responses to Rejected Religious Beliefs in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. The paper highlights two experiments, which claim to demonstrate a correlation between moral and physical disgust. Ritter found that self-described Christians rated a beverage more disgusting after hand copying passages of the Qur'an or The God Delusion than after copying a control text (the dictionary). Ritter's abstract concludes, “These results provide evidence that contact with a rejected religious belief elicits disgust and that both negative and positive moral contagions can be removed through physical cleansing.”

Literally Disgusting Experiments

Ritter's first experiment used Christian participants and gauged their disgust response to differing religious viewpoints: atheism and Islam. Ritter writes, “Using pre-screening measures administered to the Subject Pool, only participants who reported their religious affiliation as ―Christian could volunteer to participate. This population was targeted for two reasons. First, Christianity is the most widespread religion on campus, making Christian participants more readily accessible relative to the followers of other religions. Second, religious identity should play an important role in whether one finds another belief system to violate the ethic of purity.”

Participants were randomly assigned to copy passages from either the Qur'an, the holy book of Islam, or The God Delusion, a text on atheism by prominent philosopher Richard Dawkins. Other participants in a control group were assigned pages from the dictionary, a neutral text. Eighty two participants, 29 men and 53 women, with a mean age of 19 were used. The test subjects were told they were taking part in a consumer survey, drinking varieties of lemon water, and a test on the relationship of handwriting to personality. Participants in controlled experiments are commonly misled to prevent biased results.

Participants were given two beverages labeled “A” and “B” and a sheet of paper for writing. They first tasted beverage “A” and rated their disgust. They were then asked to complete the handwriting portion of the test and copied a given text on to the paper. The given portions of text were selected because they directly conflicted with common Christian belief. Next the subjects were instructed to taste beverage “B” and rate their disgust. While both beverages were of identical composition Christian participants who copied the Qur'an or the Dawkins text rated beverage “B” as more disgusting than beverage “A”, while dictionary readers showed no statistically significant difference in their ratings of beverages “A” and “B”. Further, those who read the Qur'an and Dawkins each showed the same level of increased disgust after copying the texts.

Ritter summarized, “Two studies provide evidence that contact with rejected belief systems produces a disgust response. In Experiment 1, Christian participants rated a drink to taste more disgusting after writing a passage from the Qur’an or Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, but not a control text.”

Moral Disgust and Physical Disgust Linked

Ritter draws the conclusion that “moral” disgust correlates to physical disgust. The paper explains that the origins of physical disgust lie in self-preservation in primitive man (old meat that smells bad will make you sick; avoid disgusting things). Ritter explained, “Important for the present research, disgust has been strongly implicated as the moral emotion of this foundation (Rozin et al., 1999b), serving to protect both the physical and spiritual body from harmful influences. Disgust has even been dubbed ―the body and soul emotion for its role in providing the affective input for the intuitions that inform us of physical and moral impurities (Rozin, Haidt, & McCauley, 1999a) The intuitive averse reaction to disgust translates into socio-moral perceptions of purity (reading the Qur'an or Dawkins is a morally dangerous act to Christians, and their bodies react as if it were a physical threat).”

Ritter's conclusions are supported by previous research using fMRI technology to map brain activity when participants are asked to make moral transgressions, such as lying. “In comparison to sentences categorized as true or unknown, these researchers found that participants reading false statements showed an increased BOLD response in the anterior insula and left frontal operculum; areas of the brain that have previously been linked to taste perception and disgust (Harris et al., 2008).” Further, researchers found that the areas of the brain previously linked with smell and taste reacted when participants were confronted with ideas such as incest or murder.

What You Should Be Asking

Islam and Richard Dawkins are also political buzzwords in the United States. Can we be sure the disgust reaction was purely moral and not the product of media or political bias?

*images via Wired.com and Richard Dawkins