bad taste

From: American Painter

"Immorality is inevitably tied to social constructions and our value system. Ultimately, it is defined by the idea of morality inherent to our social context. We seldom stop to think about what the intrinsic idea of immorality actually means in the mind. [...]
     Researchers found a consistent left-hemisphere bias for processing different kinds of immoral stimuli. Interesting as the results may be, this is only the tip of the iceberg. The implications of understanding how the brain actually processes immoral stimuli could have a tremendous value for both neurological study and psychology. Opening up multiple possibilities for future research, the study pointed to a consistent pattern of brain response to 'immorality,' as the left-hemisphere activity was observed in the case of both sexual and non-sexual immoral stimuli. [...]
     The brain doesn’t process moral and immoral thoughts the same way under different circumstances. Curiously, a study from earlier this year showed that drinking something bitter deepens the perceived immorality of a certain event. When researchers asked a group of undergraduates to rate their moral distaste for various acts generally perceived as distasteful, including bribes, shoplifting, a man eating his dead dog, and two second cousins having sex. During the questioning, subjects were offered bitter, sweet or neutral drinks, the latter being water. The moral disapproval was 17% greater for those sipping bitter drinks, pointing to a possibly much greater influence of sensory experiences on our perceptions of immorality than we might have ever imagined."
— Veronica Pamoukaghlian, BrainBlogger
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