A recent study found that the emotion of disgust is likely to be related in some way to the physiological feeling of nausea. Furthermore, researchers have shown that the feeling of disgust is directly involved in the formation of our moral judgments - that is, whether an action is right or wrong. And how did they discover it? With a set of experiments involving ginger! It turns out that ginger has an indirect effect on our moral judgments.
Ginger indirectly affects our moral judgments. In other words: if you eat ginger, you will be less strict about actions that do not seem right to you, than if you do not eat ginger (this is, of course, a higher probability and not a guarantee). And how can certain foods affect our compass of right and wrong? This was deciphered by researchers from the University of British Columbia in Canada. It is known that ginger reduces the feeling of nausea. V the first experiment, part of the participants were given ginger and the other part a sugar candy. Then they had to report, how much disgust they feel at different photos (say a photo of old meat or a photo of a man vomiting in a toilet, etc.). The group that ate ginger averaged expressed less disgust. Since we know that ginger affects the feeling of nausea, it may be possible that they are Disgust and the physiological feeling of nausea are somehow connected.
V another experiment the participants (one ate ginger, the other sugar) had to say how strictly they judged certain transgression of moral boundaries (for example, how questionable is marriage with a cousin, or how questionable is it that a worker in a morgue touches the open eye of a corpse out of interest). Again, it turned out that those participants who are consumed ginger, condemned morally objectionable actions less harshly.The third and fourth experiments were replications of the second with added examples of violence, disrespect for authority, cheating, etc., and also showed that ginger affects the rigor of our moral judgments.
The point of this research is not that we can do questionable actions faster when we eat ginger (the effects of ginger were very, very small), but that there is a connection between the physiological feeling of nausea and disgust, and between disgust and moral judgment.
More information:
psycnet.apa.org
