Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

Hotheads | 381the two laws of sympathetic magic—voodoo—found in many traditionalcultures: the law of contagion (once in contact, always in contact) andthe law of similarity (like produces like).Though disgust is universal, the list of nondisgusting animals differsfrom culture to culture, and that implies a learning process. As everyparent knows, children younger than two put everything in theirmouths, and psychoanalysts have had a field day interpreting their lackof revulsion for feces. Rozin and his colleagues studied the developmentof disgust by offering children various foods that American adultsfind disgusting. To the horror of their onlooking parents, sixty-two percentof toddlers ate imitation dog feces ("realistically crafted frompeanut butter and odorous cheese"), and thirty-one percent ate agrasshopper.Rozin suggests that disgust is learned in the middle school-age years,perhaps when children are scolded by their parents or they see the lookon their parents' faces when they approach a disgusting object. But I findthat unlikely. First, all the subjects older than toddlers behaved virtuallythe same as the adults did. For example, four-year-olds wouldn't eat imitationfeces or drink juice with a grasshopper in it; the only differencebetween them and the adults was that the children were less sensitive tocontamination by brief contact. (Not until the age of eight did the childrenreject juice briefly dipped with a grasshopper or with imitation dogfeces.) Second, children above the age of two are notoriously finicky, andtheir parents struggle to get them to eat new substances, not to avoid oldones. (The anthropologist Elizabeth Cashdan has documented that children'swillingness to try new foods plummets after the third birthday.)Third, if children had to learn what to avoid, then all animals would bepalatable except for the few that are proscribed. But as Rozin himselfpoints out, all animals are disgusting except for a few that are permitted.No child has to be taught to revile greasy grimy gopher guts or mutilatedmonkey meat.Cashdan has a better idea. The first two years, she proposes, are asensitive period for learning about food. During those years mothers controlchildren's food intake and children eat whatever they are permitted.Then their tastes spontaneously shrink, and they stomach only the foodsthey were given during the sensitive period. Those distastes can last toadulthood, though adults occasionally overcome them from a variety ofmotives: to dine with others, to appear macho or sophisticated, to seekthrills, or to avert starvation when familiar fare is scarce.