TikTok’s Obsession with Pimple Popping Has Deep Roots in Evolution – Newsweek

Social media is awash with disgusting medical-themed videos involving everything from doctors popping pimples to extracting ingrown hairs. But what can explain the popularity of these gut-churning clips and why do so many people love watching them so much?

These videos can rack up thousands, hundreds of thousands or even millions of views. One of the most well-known channels, Dr. Pimple Popper, has more than 15 million followers on TikTok, and over 2 billion views on YouTube.

One clip posted to TikTok in June, 2021, with the caption "Happy Sunday" shows a spot slowly being squeezed with an extractor tool. It has since been viewed almost 65 million times.

This kind of footage regularly provokes a feeling of disgust, which is generally thought to be a negative emotion. According to Daniel Kelly, a professor in the Department of Philosophy at Purdue University, and the author of Yuck!: The Nature and Moral Significance of Disgust, this emotion evolved to primarily protect us from two thingspotentially poisonous foods and contagious diseases.

"The emotion took on other functions on top of those as humans got more socially complex, and can be triggered by moral violations linked with 'purity' or by members of out-groups that are seen as far down the social hierarchy," Kelly told Newsweek.

The disgust that people feel after watching these kinds of videos is probably linked to the fact that the emotion evolved to help us avoid contracting a disease or becoming contaminated with an infection.

"It's a component of our pre-emptive behavioral immune system, as it were," Kelly said. "But since we can't directly perceive most of the things that make us sickbacteria, viruses, other kinds of microbeswe tend to be sensitive and alert to more easily perceivable indicators, especially signs that someone else is less than fully healthy, and so might transmit their unhealthiness to us if we get to close."

"The most common signs are other people who are obviously sick, sneezing, sweating, coughing, outbreaks of sores or other skin aberrations. So that's what disgust is on the 'look out' forit's those kinds of cues that it tends to be very sensitive to. Falling within this category are the kinds of cysts and pimples and other things that are center-stage in a lot of these videos."

The popping of cysts, pimples and other similar bodily abnormalities, are particular triggers of disgust because this act leads to the release of bodily fluids.

"Bodily fluids, especially bodily fluids that have left the bodyblood, spit, sexual fluids, waste products and other excretionsare some of the most universal and potent triggers of disgust there are," Kelly said. "Not coincidentally, they're also some of the most robust vectors of disease transmission."

"What happens to someone who is experiencing the emotion of disgust is multi-faceted," Kelly said, "You make that yuck face, you tend to think of the disgusting thing as contaminated and contaminating, polluted, you get that flash of nausea and emotional frissonbut you also tend to keep an eye on, keep track of, whatever it is that triggered your disgust."

So if watching gross medical videos disgusts us, why do so many people love watching them, while many others cannot bear the sight of such clips? According to Kelly, the answer is, again, multi-faceted.

"There's the general thrill of catharsis and living vicariously through someone else, of which this is just a specific instancewhatever is satisfying about these sorts of phenomena when they happen to us, we get a sort of paler shadow of the same satisfaction when we see it happening to someone else," he said.

Disgusting things are also very good at attracting and capturing our attention, perhaps not surprisingly given the evolutionary role of the emotion.

"It's just part of the way the psychological system works, how it's able to do its job well," Kelly said. "I think that adds to why these videos tend to get so many hitswatching triggers this psychological system, and not only do you get to live vicariously and what something that is intrinsically interesting, but you get a little charge of emotion, the experience itself has a little bit of voltage."

According to Kelly, the valence, or subjective value, of the disgusting event may be aversive, but only slightly. He compares watching these kinds of videos to the way that some people seek out feelings with negative valence in small doses, such as eating spicy foods, which can cause pain, or going for a run, which can produce a burning sensation in the muscles.

Another reason people may seek out these kinds of videos is that is a chance to have an interesting experience without actually being exposed to the risks and dangers that disgust evolved to protect us against.

"You're seeing the stuff through a screennot only can you turn it off whenever you want, or look away, but you're not at all at risk of being infected with anything," Kelly said. "There's a prophylactic effect, and I think that allows people to more safely indulge the experience. It's similar in a lot of ways to how people like to go on roller coasters or bungie jumpyou get the thrill, voltage, and experience of the feeling of hurling towards your death, but really you are quite safe.

"Likewise with, say, horror moviesyou get to experience intense fear, but you're not really about to be killed by a axe murderer or turned into a zombie. It's sort of an emotional freebieditto with the disgust people feel with these pimple videos."

Val Curtis, director of the Environmental Health Group at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said seeking out these kinds of experiences may have an evolutionary basis.

"If you're a small primate, it's really important to learn thingsto learn what's frightening, to learn what's disgusting," Curtis told the BBC. "We all seek out opportunities to learnand that's called play."

"It's similar to the fear response. We're attracted to roller coasters, for example, because it's really nasty and scary, but you learn what it is to be frightened. We all have a drive to play, and try out things safely. You're practising to see what happens."

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TikTok's Obsession with Pimple Popping Has Deep Roots in Evolution - Newsweek