Taboo : The role of disgust in assessing the risks of GM foods

1. Taboo: The role of disgust in assessing the risks of GM foods

2. Geneticallymodifiedorganisms (GMOs) • According to inventors and producers, highlybeneficial: • Development of a sustainableagriculture (environmental and socio-economical) • Part of the solution to the world’shungerproblem

3. Increased public resistanceagainstGMOs, particularly in Europe • Eurobarometer: • on average, only 27 percent supports the technology (butconsiderablenationaldifferences) • Declining trend (e.g., in Belgium, over a period of 14 years, support droppedfrom half to a quarter of the population

4. Increased public resistanceagainstGMOs • environmentalistgroups and organizations (Field LiberationMovement, Greenpeace, etc.): GMOs pose irresponsibleenvironmental, socio-economic and healthrisks

5. Emotionallycharged? • Deaf to studies and argumentsthatdebunk concerns • Technique is notessentially different fromnaturalprocessesorclassicalbreeding • Generally, GMOs do not have a negative effect onbiodiversity • Local farmers and communities benefit fromGMOs

6. Emotionallycharged? • Shift in claims thatjustifyopposition : • First, safety of technology and possiblehealthrisks • Then, concerns about the environment • Finally, socio-economic concerns • Non-arguments: “it’sunnatural”

7. Disgust

8. Disgust • Evolved in response to adaptiveproblemsrelating to foodmonitoring and the avoidance of pathogens • Physiologically: • Gape face (nosewrinkle, extrusion of the tongue, wrinkled upper brow, imitatingactualretching) • Nausea • Quickwithdrawalfrompossiblecontaminatingsource

9. Core disgust • A feeling of oralincorporation: a pronouncedoralfeel • A sense of offensiveness: the presence of disgusting items is upsetting • Contaminationsensitivity: disgusting items cancontaminateharmless items withtheiroffensiveness • Unity of response: onceelicited, the response comes as a package

10. Richdiversity in elicitors • Humanuniversals: spoiledmeat, deadcorpses, etc. • Evolutionaryrationalebehinddiversity • Flexibility to adjust to local environments; cultural input • The disgust response is on a hairtrigger: it’sbetter to be safe than sorry • Butthere are certain trends…

11. Food • containingsomethingthat is deemed to bedisgusting (haggis) • Resembling a classical disgust elicitor: a biscuit thatlookslike a turd • Havingcome in touch with a possiblecontaminatingsource, e.g. orangejuicestirredwith a sterile toilet brush

12. Otherelicitors • A variety of living animals: • Creepy-crawlies • Animalsassociatedwithdisease and decay • Parasitic and poisonousanimals • “deviant” sexualbehavior

13. Moral disgust • Connectionbetweenmoral disgust and core disgust remains to bespecified • Feelings of disgust affect people’sjudgment: “student council representative […] tries to take topics that appeal to both professors and students in order to stimulate discussion” “it just seems like he’s up to something” “popularity-seeking snob”

14. Moral disgust • violations of purity norms that are part of a moral code that is associated with spiritual health and the realm of divinity or, in secular societies, the natural order • to bodily norm violations, i.e. violations of norms regarding the proper use of the body (food, sex, etc.) • influence of disgust on moral judgment has been shown to be very persistent

15. Disgust as anethnic marker • signaling to which group one belongs or one identifies with and who is a trustworthy and cooperative member of that group • helps to distinguish the in- from the out-group • Because of contaminating potential, people from out-group and norm violators are considered to be disgusting too

16. GMOs and disgust • Sorgo, et al., 2011: an exploratory study that found a correlation between disgust and the rejection of GMOs • Survey among Ghent University students: higher self-reported disgust sensitivity significantly relates to a stronger negative perception of GMOs

17. GMOs and core disgust • Oralincorporation • Public is more concernedabout green biotechnologythan of white or red biotech • Public is more concernedabout GM foodthanGMOsgrownfor non-food purposes • Public is more concernedaboutgeneticallymodifiedanimalsthanplants; cross-culturally, meat is much more frequently tabooed (and found disgusting) than vegetables

18. Psychologicalessentialism • Organisms have thought to have unobservable, immutablecoresthatdeterminetheiridentity • DNA is interpreted as the essence of anorganism • Hence, the modification of DNA is regarded as the contamination of the essence

19. Psychologicalessentialism • Eurobarometer 2010: fifty-five percent supports cisgenic apples (apples with genetic input from another race of apples) , whereas only thirty-three percent supports transgenic apples (apples modified with DNA from other species) • US poll, 2004: fifteen percent of the participants (about one in six) believed that when you introduce the genes of a catfish into a tomato, the latter will taste like fish, and forty-three percent was unsure!

20. Psychologicalessentialism • worries about the genetic antibiotic resistance markers that are used in the development of GM foods, assuming that the antibiotic resistance of the genes will transfer onto their own bodies and undermine their health • Made worse by scientists describing DNA as the essence or identity of life

21. Anti-GMOactivists as moralpsychologists

24. GMOs and moral disgust • Contaminating power of disgusting items • Breach of a moral code relating to purity; a crime against nature, unnatural, playing God • Makesonevery sensitive to moralargumentsagainst GMO justifying disgust and to descriptions of scientists and developers as morallydegraded

25. GMOs and moral disgust

26. Culturaltransmission • Transmission of culturalvariantsdeeplyaffectedbypeculiarities of the humanmind • Psychologicalmechanisminvolvedwithsociallearning (Richerson & Boyd 2005): • Prestige bias • Conformist bias • domain-specific psychological mechanisms that prefer one cultural variant over the other based on the ease by which their content can be mentally processed (Sperber 1996): content biases

27. Disgust as content bias • Nichols (2004): sixteenth century etiquette norms relating to disgusting behavior were more likely to survive than others • Heath and colleagues (2001): people were more likely to pass along stories that elicited stronger disgust; urban legends that contained more disgusting motifs were distributed more widely on an urban legend Web sites.

28. Disgust as content bias • Charash and McKay (2002): attention bias for words relating to disgust (vomit, decay, rotting, etc.) • In other words, for cultural variants, it pays to be disgusting

29. Implicationsfor risk politics • Discrepancybetween risk assessmentby experts and laypeople • public’s perception of risk is affected by particular socio-psychological and cultural factors: social amplification of risk • “understanding the socio-cultural construction of risk is important for improving risk communication and policy development about GM foods” (Finucane & Holup, 2005) • a “socially more robust evaluation” of risk (Devos, et al., 2008)

30. Implicationsfor risk politics • emotionsneed to be taken into account as well • Disgust is a risk aversiveemotion, affecting risk assessment at severallevels • Core disgust: healthrisks, environmentalrisks • Moral disgust: somethingintrinsically wrong with and riskyaboutGMOs; somethingthatshouldbeavoided at all costs • Ethnic marker: socialrisks

31. Solutions? • Realizethat disgust affect public responses to GMOs: very persistent and robust, requiringspecificmeasures • Immunize the public against disgust evokingdiscoursebyprovidinginformationthatspecificallyaddressesmoral concerns and digustelicitingelements • Let the peoplegetused to it • Emphasize the personalbenefitspeoplegainfrom the technology