NT Experience

“This is toxic; it will contaminate me; I must expel it.”

Curiously the moral disgust emotion shares biological circuitry with the physical disgust feeling. Being disgusted by a person feels the same way as watching somebody vomit or tasting rotten food.

The trigger for disgust in NT people is social and ethical violations. Since NT ethics are deeply tied to social cohesion, this makes sense. When people hear about a horrible crime it may be described as “sickening” – that is literally part of the feeling. Taboo social behaviors trigger the same reaction

My Experience

Of course I feel the same physical disgust from smelling or eating rotten food: that is a hard wired physiological response to keep us safe from things that might poison us.

I do feel something that I label “disgust” (moral) but it only has coincidental overlap with the NT triggers and none of the same internal feeling. In a similar way, violation of my Ethics (note: these are different than NT ethics!) triggers a feeling of Anger or Hate (note: also different, more like a label) toward the situation and sometimes the people.

Yes, if somebody commits a horrible crime, e.g. murder, I feel “disgust”. What an awful thing to do and to have happen. The person doesn’t “disgust” me, unless perhaps they were gleeful in it – that would be a violation on top of the crime. The action itself violates my number 1 ethical rule about harming others.

I feel the same way about lying and corrupt politicians. I am disgusted with the action and some of that rubs off on the people: they are doing it and probably on purpose. This “disgust” is more a label of “badness” than a strong feeling. If I have a conversation about these people I will feel angry at the waste and corruption, but it is a much colder emotion than NT people would feel.

I think in the end, disgust is a higher magnitude Hate – a value of extreme dislike. I don’t use the word much as I am not sure I can easily discriminate at the top end of dislike.

Comparison

From my point of view it is similar triggering conditions, but that is only because I can’t see the social signals that people might violate. Many things that would trigger disgust in NT people mean nothing to me, and as I understand, my ethics would seem quite rigid to an NT person and these triggers might mean little to them. The internal feeling is entirely different. I see the output (very strong dislike) as indistinguishable from Hate, which is quite different than the NT experience.

Semantic Divergence: yes.