Moral taboos – The daily blog of behavioral and cognitive economics

When you feel moral disgust, what’s the emotion telling you?

‘Disgusting’ and similar words are flung across political divides quite often today. For example, the US president Donald Trump has used the word to describe his political opponents, journalists and others. And many have voiced disgust at the president’s own behaviours. For instance, after viewing Trump’s altercation with the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy during a press conference in 2025, the author David Brooks described feeling ‘nauseated, just nauseated’. In politics and beyond, expressing disgust is a common response to actions that one finds deeply objectionable, such as racist rhetoric, acts of sexual abuse or policies that harm vulnerable people. ….[READ]