Box 1. Gut reactions

Jonathan Haidt from the University of Virginia in Charlottesville and Paul Rozin from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, with various colleagues, have developed a questionnaire to discover how prone a person is to disgust by recording how strongly they agree or disagree with a series of statements. For example:

• I might be willing to try eating monkey meat, under some circumstances.
• It would bother me to be in a science class and to see a human hand preserved in a jar.
• I never let any part of my body touch the toilet seat in public restrooms.
• It would not upset me at all to watch a person with a glass eye take the eye out of the socket.
• Even if I was hungry, I would not drink a bowl of my favorite soup if it had been stirred by a used but thoroughly washed fly swatter.
• It would bother me to sleep in a nice hotel room if I knew that a man had died of a heart attack in that room the night before.

For an interactive version of the full test, and explanation of the results, see http://yourmorals.org/

D.J.