Audio: Dr Val Curtis on the hygiene instinct, All in the Mind

In an exciting ABC first, Pool is releasing some ABC audio and video archives back to the public for use and re-use under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial licence. This audio is part of the Gene Pool remix project. If you use or reuse this clip, please attribute the speakers and ABC Radio National All in the Mind.

This excerpt is from That's Disgusting! on Radio National's All in the Mind. It was first broadcast on 30th April 2005.

TRANSCRIPT:
DR VAL CURTIS: "We started doing studies around the world trying to understand why people were hygienic, and what jumped out from those studies in Africa, in India, The Netherlands and the UK was that disgust was one of the strong factors that motivated hygienic behaviour, and so eventually looking into this, trying to understand why it was that there was this very powerful emotion that made people clean themselves when they felt they'd been contaminated by something, realising that it was common throughout the world, suddenly something clicked into place: that all the things that disgusted us were actually the things that were related to things that might make us sick. So it made sense from an evolutionary viewpoint that we've evolved behavioural defence mechanisms against pathogens. So if you like it's a hygiene instinct that all humans carry."