Why the disgust scale has no second half, and what it hides about your customers

Open almost any scientific review of emotions and look for disgust. You will find it described in detail, with shades and gradations. Now look on the same scale for the opposite pole: a full, independent state of enthusiastic acceptance, something more than the mere absence of disgust. You will most likely come up empty.

The state is real. The problem sits with the observers. Researchers looked at this scale from the disgust end and did not see what lay at the other one.

That sounds like a quarrel inside academic psychology. It is also a practical problem for anyone who studies customers, and it becomes sharper when a company from abroad tries to understand buyers in Russia through research tools built elsewhere. This article walks through the scale first, then through what it means for reading a market.

The first scale: movement towards identity or away from it

The model this article draws on describes the emotional process through seven scales. The first of them is a taxis relative to identity. Taxis is a term borrowed from biology: the directed movement of an organism towards a stimulus or away from it. Here the stimulus is anything that touches a person’s sense of self, and the movement runs either away from the self or towards it.

The negative pole is disgust. It is a reaction of rejection, a break of contact with whatever is incompatible with the zone of identity. This pole is worked out in the classic models in detail. It is easy to recognise, and it has a characteristic physiology and a characteristic facial expression.

The positive pole is the opposite movement: attraction towards identity, up to the point of merging with it. Humility belongs here, and love, beauty, pleasure, taste, delight. In most scientific models of emotion this half of the scale is missing. It is no less significant. The tradition of emotion research simply grew up around threats and dangers, which means around disgust as a working stance.

Why researchers missed the second half

The same logic works here as with sensitive periods in development: if a zone of the scale has not been lived through, its pole does not exist for the observer.

Consider the position of a researcher who studies emotions by analysis, by breaking them into parts and examining each critically. That position is itself a form of disgust as a stance. Analysis means distance and dissection. Such a stance is structurally incompatible with the positive pole of the same scale, which is a state of merging with an object, dissolving into it without taking it apart.

So in models built analytically the negative pole is described in detail and the positive one is barely mentioned. The method of inquiry itself ruled out the possibility of seeing it.

Two answers to the same question

Take the question “what do you feel towards this person?” and compare two answers.

The first answer: “He makes my skin crawl.” It is instantly recognisable and fits neatly onto a familiar scale as disgust.

The second answer: “I just want to be near him, for no reason, without thinking about it. I enjoy it.” Formally this describes a point on the same scale with the opposite sign. Yet it sounds vague. Language and the scientific tradition lack precise words for this territory.

This is no accident. The positive pole of the identity scale has been studied and named far less than the negative one. It does not occur less often. It is harder to see with the optics people usually look through.

What this does to customer research

Now carry the scale out of the laboratory and into a marketing department.

The standard toolkit of customer research leans towards the disgust end. Complaint analysis, churn interviews, detractor scores, negative sentiment tagging in reviews, lists of objections from the sales team. Each of these catches rejection, because rejection is easy to name and easy to count. A customer who is irritated says so in clear words. A customer who is quietly at home with your product rarely says anything, and when asked, gives an answer that sounds like the second reply above: pleasant, unspecific, hard to code.

The result is a lopsided picture. A research report can tell you in detail why people leave, and say almost nothing about why the others stay. The analyst who wrote it was doing honest work. The analytical stance that produced the report is the same stance that hides the positive pole.

This matters because what holds a customer is usually located on that positive half: a sense that the brand fits who they are, a pleasure in the routine of buying from you, a taste for the way you do things. Strategy built only on the negative half turns into a programme of fixing irritants. Fixing irritants is necessary. It does not tell you what to amplify.

Where the Russian market makes this sharper

Everything above applies in any market. Several features of working in Russia, as I see them in practice, make the imbalance stronger for a company entering from abroad. These are observations from practice, not survey data.

The first is the tooling. Research methods, sentiment dictionaries and review-scoring models are mostly developed in English and then applied to Russian text. Russian has its own ways of expressing quiet approval: understatement, a dry “it’s fine” that in context means real satisfaction, praise wrapped in a small complaint. A model tuned on English tends to read those as neutral or even mildly negative. The disgust end translates well, since rejection sounds rejecting in any language. The acceptance end is exactly where the vocabulary is thin, and machine translation thins it further.

The second is where Russian customers speak. Feedback here concentrates on local platforms such as Yandex Maps reviews, marketplace product pages and independent review sites, plus messenger chats, more than on the channels a Western team usually monitors. Public reviews of every kind skew towards the people who had a reason to write, and a strong reason is more often rejection than acceptance. A team abroad that reads only the most visible complaints is looking at the scale from its disgust end twice over: once through the method, once through the sample.

The third is the contrast with search. On Google-centred markets many teams rely on large panels and off-the-shelf audience tools to get a sense of what customers like. In Russia the comparable data sources sit inside the Yandex ecosystem and in local platforms, and they need to be set up and read by someone who knows the context. Copying the home research template without that adjustment gives you numbers, and the numbers will lean negative.

None of this means Russian buyers are harder to please. It means their acceptance is quieter and less legible to imported instruments, so it is more likely to go unrecorded.

What to do if you sell into Russia from another country

A short route, in the order I would take it:

1. Separate the two halves in your research brief. Ask one set of questions about what pushes customers away and a separate set about what draws them in. If the second set is missing, the report will be about the first half only, whatever its title says.
2. Interview loyal customers as carefully as lost ones. Churn interviews are standard. Interviews with customers who have stayed for a long time without complaint are rare, and they are where the positive pole lives.
3. Allow vague answers and work with them. When a customer says “I just like it here”, do not code it as neutral and move on. Ask about specific moments: when they last chose you over an alternative, what they would miss, what feels like theirs. Concrete episodes give the positive pole the words it lacks.
4. Read Russian feedback in Russian, with a native reader. Machine sentiment scores are a starting point, never a verdict. Understatement and irony need a person who hears them.
5. Look at the whole sample. Public reviews, marketplace comments and messenger threads each hold a different slice of the scale. Weighting the loudest one gives you the disgust end by default.
6. Feed the positive half into positioning. What customers quietly accept is the raw material for a brand that fits them. That work belongs to brand strategy, and it starts from what is already working rather than from the complaint log.

If you need a team to run this kind of research on the ground, that is what customer research for the Russian market is for.

What this changes in self-observation

The same blind spot applies to the person doing the looking. If you describe your own state using a habitual vocabulary, you risk systematically underrating the positive pole of this scale, simply because there are fewer ready-made words for it. Disgust is easy to name. A state of deep, unobtrusive acceptance and merging with something, without critical dissection, often stays nameless, and it is no less real for that.

If you find it hard to describe positive states connected with identity, the difficulty is no sign that there is nothing to describe. Language and the usual optics are poorly suited to this half of the scale.

What this changes in working with others

The same holds when you try to understand someone else. A person may describe something like deep, calm acceptance: no sharp rapture, no pronounced euphoria, just a steady “I feel good in this, without analysing it”. That state deserves full weight even though it is named less precisely and fits the usual categories less well. It occupies a position on the scale as significant as sharp disgust does at the other end. It is only harder to notice for someone used to looking at emotions analytically.

The identity scale does not end where the vocabulary ends. The lack of a precise word for the positive pole does not mean the pole is absent. It means that the observer has so far been standing on the wrong side to see it. For a company reading Russian customers through imported instruments, that observer is often the company itself.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Russian version of this article on belokrylovo.ru: Почему у шкалы отвращения нет второй половины