Tight Culture Facilitates Animal Reminder Disgust: Semantic Computation and Experimental Evidence

Human societies usually believe that there is an essential difference between humans and animals, and are disgusted by their own animal nature, which is known as animal reminder disgust. Animal reminder disgust has fueled the human quest for a world of higher meaning and is the foundation upon which the worldview of human culture has been built. Combining large-scale corpus analysis with experimental methods, this study found that tight culture (strong social norms) enhanced animal reminder disgust. Study 1 analyzed a corpus of English from the past two centuries using the Word Embedding Association Test method, it was found that people in tighter decades are more inclined to consider greater differences between humans and animals i.e. humans are pure and animals are impure. Studies 2 manipulated perceptions of cultural tightness, and showed that tight culture increased animal reminder disgust by raising requirements for purity. These results demonstrate how culture shapes human perceptions of themselves and explain some cultural phenomena in human societies, such as why religions typically emphasize the distinction between humans and animals.