#22 The surprising traits of Hitler
At a campsite in Tierra del Fuego, Charles Darwin was enjoying a portion of cold preserved meat when a naked indigenous man came over and poked at it with his finger, showing "utter disgust at its softness."1 Darwin was also disgusted at having his snack fingered by a stranger, but he became curious about his own reaction; the man's finger wasn't dirty, so was it his nakedness that caused his disgust? Or his foreignness?
Disgust is a protective negative emotion;2 if you smell something disgusting, the nose-wrinkling expression you make closes your nasal passage to prevent further exposure, and we physically avoid disease-causing things like urine, faeces, and vomit. But disgust also extends into the social, moral, and political spheres, where people who are more sensitive to disgust might feel repulsed by certain ethnic groups, and are more likely to oppose immigration.3 There is also a link between disgust sensitivity and the Big Five personality trait Conscientiousness (specifically its Orderliness aspect),4 and it is these connections that provide an interesting perspective into Hitler's personality.
According to a book written by his personal secretary,5 Hitler was very strong-willed: he was proud that he could stand with his arm extended for hours on end, and if he put on weight, he'd starve himself for a few weeks and brag about losing 7 kilos in 14 days. He was highly punctual; his watch was always set a few minutes early. He was harsh, inflexible, and excessively judgemental to not only those around him but to himself as well, which is why his trembling hand (caused by Parkinson's disease)6 was such an embarrassment to him. Apparently, he also bathed several times a day, and considered banning smoking for all of Germany.
These descriptors match someone who scores very high in the Big Five trait Conscientiousness, particularly its Orderliness aspect,7 which is correlated with being highly sensitive to disgust. The purpose of disgust seems to be to avoid disease, and can be seen as a key part of the "behavioural immune system".8 The major risk of people spreading germs can partially explain why disgust can motivate socially conservative views like anti-immigration, which helps avoid contact with "foreign" people who might carry novel diseases. Think about what happened to the Native Americans when the foreign Europeans arrived: 90% of the population died.
So it seems disgust can motivate social behaviour in order to prevent infection, but what happens when that goes too far? It isn't a coincidence that Hitler seemed highly disgust-sensitive, and obsessed with cleanliness, health, and infection; Hitler's essential metaphor was that Germany was a pure body, and the Jews were the parasites: the "Final Solution" was to therefore eliminate Jews. There was no actual threat of disease, and yet somehow this repetitive use of a disgust-triggering metaphor lead to the Holocaust and the deaths of millions of people.
While some have argued this was just a language trick used by the Nazis for propaganda, author Andreas Musolff insists in his book9 that this body-illness-parasite metaphor was an "integral part of the ideology that made the Holocaust happen." And as Robert Sapolsky points out, our brain doesn't cleanly differentiate between what's real and what's metaphorical;10 moral disgust activates the same brain region as disgust of parasites, and "purification" behaviour has an ancient evolutionary history, way before culture was invented.11 So it wasn't just a metaphor, because the Nazis actually treated other human beings as parasites: Zyklon B was the chemical pesticide first used to disinfect and "purify" warehouses, and then later used to murder 1.1 million people in gas chambers.
How is it that a disease metaphor could grip an entire nation? A fascinating 2013 study found that higher blood parasite count in a population, which implies higher likelihood of disease, is predictive of authoritarian governments.12 When faced with the danger of disease, it might be that people are more willing to obey and conform to authoritarian policies; this seems to explain the draconian COVID-19 lockdown policies we saw enforced in most countries. There were also echoes of this disease metaphor when US politicians used the term "Chinese virus", which lead to a spike in violent attacks against Asian-Americans during the pandemic's early stages.13
When the language of dehumanisation is used against a certain group of people, the mass murder might not be far off: Jews were parasites in the Holocaust, Tutsis were cockroaches in the Rwandan genocide, and political enemies were worms in the Khmer Rouge massacre in Cambodia. To not repeat history, we need to watch out particularly for disease-body metaphors used politically, and also understand the potential problems of being high in the Orderliness and Conscientiousness personality traits. And as David Smith argues in his book "Less Than Human",14 this “problem of dehumanisation is everyone's problem: we are all potential dehumanisers, just as we are all potential objects of dehumanisation.”
LAFM #22: There are potential problems of being too high in the Big Five trait Conscientiousness due to the link with disgust and its related behaviour, and we must also be aware of the dangers of dehumanisation language.
Young, M. (2021, December 27). How Disgust Explains Everything. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/27/magazine/disgust-science.html
Haidt, J., McCauley, C., & Rozin, P. (1994). Individual differences in sensitivity to disgust: A scale sampling seven domains of disgust elicitors. Personality and Individual Differences, 16(5), 701–713. https://doi.org/10.1016/0191-8869(94)90212-7
Aarøe, L., Petersen, M. B., & Arceneaux, K. (2017). The Behavioral Immune System Shapes Political Intuitions: Why and How Individual Differences in Disgust Sensitivity Underlie Opposition to Immigration. The American Political Science Review, 111(2), 277–294. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26289042
Xu, X., Karinen, A. K., Chapman, H. A., Peterson, J. B., & Plaks, J. E. (2019). An orderly personality partially explains the link between trait disgust and political conservatism. Cognition and Emotion, 34(2), 302–315. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2019.1627292
Schroeder, C. (2011). He was My Chief: The Memoirs of Adolf Hitler’s Secretary. In Google Books. Frontline Books. https://books.google.com/books/about/He_was_My_Chief.html?id=50lsygAACAAJ
Kaplan, R. M. (2015). Was Hitler Ill? A Reply to Eberle and Neumann. German Politics and Society, 33(3), 70–79. https://doi.org/10.3167/gps.2015.330304
DeYoung, C. G., Quilty, L. C., & Peterson, J. B. (2007). Between facets and domains: 10 aspects of the Big Five. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 93(5), 880–896. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.93.5.880
Ackerman, J. M., Hill, S. E., & Murray, D. R. (2018). The behavioral immune system: Current concerns and future directions. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 12(2), e12371. https://doi.org/10.1111/spc3.12371
Musolff, A. (2014). Metaphor, Nation and the Holocaust: The Concept of the Body Politic. In Google Books. Routledge. https://books.google.com/books/about/Metaphor_Nation_and_the_Holocaust.html?id=5vmEoAEACAAJ
Sapolsky, R. (2010, November 14). This Is Your Brain on Metaphors. Opinionator. https://archive.nytimes.com/opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/this-is-your-brain-on-metaphors/
Curtis, V. A. (2007). Dirt, disgust and disease: a natural history of hygiene. Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health, 61(8), 660–664. https://doi.org/10.1136/jech.2007.062380
Murray, D. R., Schaller, M., & Suedfeld, P. (2013). Pathogens and Politics: Further Evidence That Parasite Prevalence Predicts Authoritarianism. PLoS ONE, 8(5), e62275. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0062275
Han, S., Riddell, J. R., & Piquero, A. R. (2022). Anti-Asian American Hate Crimes Spike During the Early Stages of the COVID-19 Pandemic. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 38(3-4), 088626052211070. https://doi.org/10.1177/08862605221107056
Smith, D. L. (2011). Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others. In Google Books. St. Martin’s Publishing Group. https://books.google.com.my/books/about/Less_Than_Human.html?id=rWAiRrm3LkcC&redir_esc=y