E180: Attraction & Disgust: Evolutionary Psychology Explained (Dr. Deb Lieberman)

Evolutionary psychologist Debra Lieberman explains how “disgust” and other built-in mental programs shape attraction, kinship, morality, and even law—while modern technology and social media scramble the cues those systems evolved to track.

Guest bio:

Dr. Debra Lieberman is a professor of psychology at the University of Miami and an evolutionary psychologist who studies how evolved “mental apps” shape social life—kinship, cooperation, morality, sexuality, and emotions. She’s the co-author of Objection: Disgust, Morality, and the Law.

Topics discussed:

• What makes someone “hot”: symmetry, hormonal cues, and universal vs learned templates
• Male vs female mate preferences (fertility cues; resource/provisioning cues; kindness/safety)
• Disgust as an evolved system for pathogen avoidance (food, touch/contact, sex)
• Incest avoidance, the Westermarck effect, kibbutzim and “minor marriages” evidence
• Sexual reproduction, pathogens, and why “mixing the gene pool” matters
• How disgust bleeds into moral judgment and law; coalitions and social leverage
• Why modernity/tech changes the payoff of ancient intuitions
• Gratitude as a “sleeper” universal emotion that jumpstarts friendship
• Her evolutionary psychology textbook + MediaByte project

Main points:

• Attraction isn’t “simple”—it’s output. Your brain runs hidden machinery that converts cues into a gut-level “hot/not.”
• Symmetry functions like a health certificate. It’s hard to build a symmetric body; disruption from disease/mutations makes symmetry informative.
• Men’s and women’s preferences differ on average, but share a template. Men track fertility-linked cues; women track resource acquisition/investment cues—plus kindness/safety as a major predictor.
• Disgust is a multi-purpose regulator. It steers eating, contact, sex, and social avoidance by tracking contamination risk and other fitness costs.
• Incest avoidance relies on cues, not DNA tests. Early co-residence can trigger “this is kin” psychology even when people aren’t related (Westermarck effect).
• Modern abundance doesn’t erase ancient wiring. People calibrate to local “baselines” and still compete relative to that baseline.
• Moral disgust can be weaponized. Disgust language can rally coalitions (“those people are disgusting/bad”) and support punishment, including via law.
• Gratitude is an underappreciated social engine. It flags “this person values me more than expected,” helping form alliances beyond kin.

Top quotes:

• “Beauty is in the adaptation of the beholder.”
• “We’re not frogs… we have a very specific human operating system that guides us toward certain features and away from others.”
• “Symmetry is hard to build—it can act like a kind of health certificate.”
• “Women track resource acquisition… but one of the most critical traits is kindness—it signals safety.”
• “You smell something off and you don’t eat it—you’re not thinking ‘pathogens’… you’re thinking ‘ew’.”
• “There’s no one-size-fits-all disgust; it depends on what you were calibrated to as ‘normal.’”
• “If morality were just cooperation… why wouldn’t heterosexual men celebrate gay men for reducing competition?”
• “Gratitude is triggered when someone shows they value you more than you expected—it jumpstarts friendship.”

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