CSICON 2023 COVERAGE ]
What I Learned: Disgust, Misinformation, and the Lemon Test
KENNY BIDDLE
Erika Engelhaupt
CSICon 2023 has come and gone, and I’m still buzzing f rom all the excitement. This was my sixth conference attendance, and once again it delivered an amazing speaker lineup, presentations full of exciting information and funny jokes (yes, skeptics can be funny), and a reunion of our extended family. I’ve had the opportunity to write about my conference experiences in the past, so when asked again to cover a few of the presentations, I didn’t hesitate.
Erika Engelhaupt: How Disgust Meddles with Our Minds
Erika Engelhaupt is a f reelance science journalist who has written for National Geographic, NPR, Science News, and more. Her presentation, “Disgust: How an Overlooked Emotion Meddles with Our Minds,” was one that caught my attention when I first saw the schedule. To be honest, in the past I never gave this emotion much thought. If I found something disgusting, I simply moved on. Engelhaupt gave me more to consider.
After describing the basics of disgust, Engelhaupt dove into whether it was an innate emotion or a learned behavior. Turns out, it’s both, just with varying degrees of sensitivity. One (funny) example came f rom poop; yes, the number two that we all do. The question was posed, “How come little kids will play with poop, but the rest of us will universally agree that poop is gross?”
What really interested me was how this emotion influences our decisions on health, food, and politics and can also lead people to accept medical myths and irrational fears. As Engelhaupt put it, “Disgust can make us less than rational.” To further make this point, Engelhaupt turned to magical thinking. First, we were shown a delicious piece of chocolate that was, unfortunately, in the shape of a pile of dog poop (law of similarity). This got quite a few laughs and comments f rom the audience such as, “Ewww!” and “Oh, hell no!” The shape of the chocolate triggered the emotion of disgust based on the idea that “if it looks like dog poop, it must be dog poop, even though rationally we know it’s chocolate.”