Why do we pick our nose?

Poking around inside our nostrils is disgusting, unhygienic and potentially harmful, so it’s baffling that it’s as common as it is, says Jason G Goldman.

Most of us do it, but few of us will admit to it. If we get caught red-handed, we experience shame and regret. And we tend to frown upon others when they do it in public. I'm talking, of course, about reaching up into your nostrils with a finger in an effort to scrape out snot. Is nose-picking really all that bad? How prevalent or bad is it, really? And why (really, why?) would anybody ever decide to see what snot tastes like?

The formal medical term used to describe the act of picking one's nose is “rhinotillexomania”. The first systematic scientific study of the phenomenon may have been undertaken as recently as 1995, by a pair of US researchers named Thompson and Jefferson. They sent a survey by mail to 1,000 adult residents of Dane County, Wisconsin. Of the 254 that responded, a whopping 91% of their respondents confessed to picking their noses, while only 1.2% could admit to doing it at least once each hour. Two subjects indicated that their nasal mining habits interfered with their daily lives (moderately to markedly). And, to their surprise, two other people reported so much nose picking that they had actually picked a hole right trough their nasal septum, the thin tissue that separates the left and right nostrils.

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