I’d speculate that by starting this conversation here, you may also gain a second interesting data set, this time about the impact of real-name vs pseudonymous identity. Discussing eating one’s own boogers is near the sweet spot of socially taboo yet objectively probably-not-too-harmful behaviors—as long as one washes one’s hands afterward, it’s unlikely to harm anyone but the person doing it.
You touch on the difference between picking the nose vs eating the boogers briefly, when commenting on how eating boogers which had been extracted from the nose with some implement other than a finger seems more repulsive than eating those extracted with a finger. From this (and personal experience), I would suggest an additional hypothesis to investigate: Picking the nose is advantageous because it cleans the nose effectively, and whether or not one eats the result is immaterial to the effect.
Ingesting one’s own bodily secretions is gross if you think too hard about it, but also pretty ordinary. If you have a nose bleed and some blood drips down the back of the throat, it gets swallowed. If you chew on your lip and a small piece of dead skin comes off, you probably swallow it rather than spitting it out. If I get a small wound on my hand, I’ll reflexively stick it right into my mouth, despite knowing that this behavior technically increases the risk of infection slightly. And this isn’t to even start on swallowing mucous from the nose by drawing it to the back of the throat at moments when it’s infeasible to blow one’s nose. We eat stuff that was recently part of our bodies all the time in various ways, and it’s only gross if you think too hard about it. This is to say that maybe eating boogers is just a convenient way to clean a finger after picking the nose with it, and the benefits/detriments of the habit are primarily related to our noses having evolved with the implicit expectation that they’d be excavated with a finger whenever necessary.
So for any scent perception based experiment around nose picking, it seems important to add a control of “pick the nose but do not eat it”. I’d personally guess that the difference between pick-and-eat versus pick-and-discard would be negligible.
I’d speculate that by starting this conversation here, you may also gain a second interesting data set, this time about the impact of real-name vs pseudonymous identity. Discussing eating one’s own boogers is near the sweet spot of socially taboo yet objectively probably-not-too-harmful behaviors—as long as one washes one’s hands afterward, it’s unlikely to harm anyone but the person doing it.
You touch on the difference between picking the nose vs eating the boogers briefly, when commenting on how eating boogers which had been extracted from the nose with some implement other than a finger seems more repulsive than eating those extracted with a finger. From this (and personal experience), I would suggest an additional hypothesis to investigate: Picking the nose is advantageous because it cleans the nose effectively, and whether or not one eats the result is immaterial to the effect.
Ingesting one’s own bodily secretions is gross if you think too hard about it, but also pretty ordinary. If you have a nose bleed and some blood drips down the back of the throat, it gets swallowed. If you chew on your lip and a small piece of dead skin comes off, you probably swallow it rather than spitting it out. If I get a small wound on my hand, I’ll reflexively stick it right into my mouth, despite knowing that this behavior technically increases the risk of infection slightly. And this isn’t to even start on swallowing mucous from the nose by drawing it to the back of the throat at moments when it’s infeasible to blow one’s nose. We eat stuff that was recently part of our bodies all the time in various ways, and it’s only gross if you think too hard about it. This is to say that maybe eating boogers is just a convenient way to clean a finger after picking the nose with it, and the benefits/detriments of the habit are primarily related to our noses having evolved with the implicit expectation that they’d be excavated with a finger whenever necessary.
So for any scent perception based experiment around nose picking, it seems important to add a control of “pick the nose but do not eat it”. I’d personally guess that the difference between pick-and-eat versus pick-and-discard would be negligible.