Abstract
Disgust is a protective emotion that coordinates a suite of cognitive and behavioral changes to reduce people's likelihood of infection. Existing research demonstrates that people react with disgust to pathogenic stimuli compared to non-pathogenic stimuli, but there has been a paucity of research examining whether people are equipped with a more finely graded disgust response: do people discriminate between pathogen threats of different magnitudes and react with more disgust toward pathogen threats of a greater magnitude? We derived multiple novel predictions from the Threat-Dependent Disgust hypothesis and tested them across three experiments involving participants from the United States and India (total n = 1,333). In Study 1 (n = 428), we tested the prediction that people would be more disgusted by a pathogen threat touching their hand relative to their foot, given that touching a pathogen with the hand is more likely to result in the pathogen entering the body envelope (e.g., through the mouth). In Study 2 (n = 453), we tested the prediction that people would be more disgusted by a pathogen threat touching another person's hand relative to another person's foot; people touch others more with their hands than with their feet, so a conspecific with a contaminated hand poses a greater disease threat than one with a pathogen on their foot. In Study 3 (n = 452), we tested the prediction that people would be more disgusted by skin wounds caused by pathogenic infections than by surgical incisions; although both wounds pose the risk of exposure to another's bodily fluids, wounds caused by pathogenic infections pose a greater disease threat. Results across all three experiments suggest that disgust is sensitive to the magnitude of pathogen threat in a more finely tuned manner than previously demonstrated. Discussion focuses on interpretation of this gradient-like sensitivity of disgust, incorporating these findings into the broader disgust literature, and future directions.