What Elicits Disgust Across Societies? Evidence from the Ethnographic Record

What Elicits Disgust Across Societies? Evidence from the Ethnographic Record
Roza G. Kamiloğlu, Joshua M. Tybur, Daniel M. T. Fessler (July 2026)


Abstract

Disgust is widely viewed as universal, yet most existing research focuses on participants from educated, industrialised large-scale societies. We drew on the Human Relations Area Files to analyse ethnographic descriptions of disgust from 52 societies, which span all eight world regions and every major subsistence type. Grouping free-text descriptions of each disgust elicitor by semantic similarity, without pre-set categories, we identified thirteen recurring themes: bodily wastes and poor hygiene; death, corpses, and tabooed foods; animals; sexual norm violations; incest; political and trust violations; supernatural and ritual transgression; disrespect and harm; property and contract violations; marriage and family strife; hospitality breaches; task and infrastructure failure; and cowardice. The most frequently mentioned elicitors were also those documented in the widest range of societies. Three functional domains proposed by adaptationist perspectives—pathogen, sexual, and moral disgust—were each identifiable across societies, with moral disgust the most widely documented, followed by pathogen disgust and then sexual disgust. Results suggest widespread commonalities in what elicits disgust across societies. We discuss these findings with regard to plausible interactions between biologically evolved psychological mechanisms and cultural evolution