The more disgusted, the more conservative

[lpetrich]

Liberals and Conservatives React in Wildly Different Ways to Repulsive Pictures - "To a surprising degree, our political beliefs may derive from a specific aspect of our biological makeup: our propensity to feel physical revulsion"

The brains of liberals and conservatives reacted in wildly different ways to repulsive pictures: Both groups reacted, but different brain networks were stimulated. Just by looking at the subjects’ neural responses, in fact, Montague could predict with more than 95 percent accuracy whether they were liberal or conservative.

The subjects in the trial were also shown violent imagery (men pointing revolvers directly at the camera, battle scenes, car wrecks) and pleasant pictures (smiling babies, beautiful sunsets, cute bunnies). But it was only the reaction to repulsive things that correlated with ideology. “I was completely flabbergasted by the predictability of the results,” Montague says.

Some of the researchers had found similar results earlier.

Compared with liberals, they’d previously found, conservatives generally pay more attention — and react more strongly — to a broad array of threats. For example, they have a more pronounced startle response to loud noises, and they gaze longer at photos of people displaying angry expressions.

A lot of earlier research agrees with that conclusion. Though the correlations found are not very strong, they are persistently present.

Using a far cruder tool for measuring sensitivity to disgust — basically a standardized questionnaire that asks subjects how they would feel about, say, touching a toilet seat in a public restroom or seeing maggots crawling on a piece of meat — numerous studies have found that high levels of sensitivity to disgust tend to go hand in hand with a “conservative ethos.” That ethos is defined by characteristics such as traditionalism, religiosity, support for authority and hierarchy, sexual conservatism, and distrust of outsiders.

 

[lpetrich]

The article continued with a section on "The Behavioral Immune System": aversion to possible sources of disease.

Why in the world would your reaction to mutilated animals, vomit, and other unwelcome things somehow be associated with your views on transgender rights, immigration, or anything else stirring debate in the news?
...
There is nothing inherently political about disgust. It evolved not to guide us at the ballot box but rather, it is widely theorized, to protect us from infection.
...
Just as a pink eye, a hacking cough, or an open wound may activate our behavioral immune system, so too can a birthmark, obesity, deformity, disability, or even liver spots. Furthermore, having germs on our mind can affect how we feel about people we perceive to be of a different race or ethnicity from ourselves.

Then a study where people were shown germ-related images like people coughing, and other sorts of threats, like car accidents.

Compared with the control group, the subjects who had seen pictures related to germs wanted to allocate a greater share of a hypothetical government advertising budget to attract people from Poland and Taiwan — familiar immigrant groups in Vancouver, where the study was conducted — rather than people from less familiar countries, such as Nigeria, Mongolia, and Brazil. Familiarity does make a difference.
...
As the researchers reported in 2017, opposition to immigration in both the Danish and American samples increased in direct proportion to a participant’s sensitivity to disgust — an association that held up even after taking into account education level, socioeconomic status, religious background, and numerous other factors.

Likewise, resistance to immigration was greater in US states with more infectious disease.

In other studies, people at desks with sticky stains judged more harshly such things as "lying on a résumé, not returning a wallet found on the street, and resorting to cannibalism in the aftermath of a plane crash" than those at clean desks. Likewise, those who smelled some vomitlike smell opposed more strongly "gay rights, pornography, and premarital sex" than those who were not given anything to smell. They even stated "significantly more agreement with biblical truth."

Across US states, greater contagion anxiety correlated with more voting for John McCain than Barack Obama in the 2008 elections.

The researchers eventually extended studies of this kind to 121 countries and found that disgust sensitivity correlated with a conservative ethos basically everywhere there were sufficient data for analysis. As Pizarro, Inbar, and the other authors of the study write in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, this result suggests that disgust sensitivity “is related to conservatism across a wide variety of cultures, geographic regions and political systems.”

 

[lpetrich]

Then the question of sensitivity to bitter tastes, a way of avoiding eating anything troublesome.

Several years ago, Pizarro learned that people vary tremendously in the number of bitter receptors they possess on their tongue, and thus in their taste sensitivity. What’s more, the trait is genetically determined. This got him wondering: If conservatives have a greater disgust sensitivity, are they also better at detecting bitter compounds.
...
Sure enough, those who had self-identified as being conservative were more sensitive to both compounds; many described them as unpleasant or downright repugnant. Liberals, on the other hand, tended not to be bothered as much by the chemicals or didn’t notice them at all.

Looking at papillae, little bumps on the tongue, with more of them meaning a stronger sense of taste,

The degree to which subjects’ views tilted to the right was, they found, in direct proportion to the density of papillae on their tongue. This result may have bearing on a puzzling partisan split in food preferences. A 2009 survey of 64,000 Americans revealed that liberals chose bitter-tasting arugula as their favorite salad green more than twice as often as conservatives did. It may also have a bearing on conservative President George H. W. Bush’s famous hatred of broccoli — an unusually bitter vegetable. Of course, sometimes a stalk of broccoli is just a stalk of broccoli.

Then,

No doubt your own political allegiances will heavily influence what you extract from the bulk of this research. If you’re liberal, you may be thinking, So this explains some of the other side’s nativism and hostility to immigration. But it’s just as easy to flip the science on its head and conclude, as conservatives might, that the left is composed of clueless naïfs whose rosy-eyed optimism about human nature — and obliviousness to various dangers — will only lead to trouble.

 

[lpetrich]

Stephen Miller: Trump’s Right-Hand Troll - The Atlantic

Miller believes his right-wing transformation may have been preordained. “I do think it’s possible to have a conservative personality,” he mused, pointing to his own deeply embedded attitudes toward criminals. Even from a young age, he said, crime stories on the news would upset him “on a core emotional level.” He bristled against the sort of “gentle rehabilitation programs” for convicts beloved by bleeding-heart Santa Monicans. “My core instinct was … to put them behind bars and keep them behind bars until they’re not a threat to anybody anymore.”

Such fearfulness seems to be be common in the Right, and it may explain why so many right-wingers are so vulnerable to some politicians' fearmongering, and it may also explain way many US right-wingers love their guns and are convinced that their opponents want to take away their guns.

Der ewige Jüde | The Holocaust Encyclopedia, "The Eternal Jew", a Nazi propaganda film: "One of the film’s most notorious sequences compares Jews to rats that carry contagion, flood the continent, and devour precious resources."

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

Conservatives need enemies to have an identity. Without some kind of nasty emotional fear and evil out there driving their behavior they don't know what to do next.

 

[Rhea]

In contemplating cause and effect, perhaps it would not be surprising if people whose tongues caused them to feel "fight/flight" more often become immersed in those response chemicals and start to exhibit them at the slightest provocation.

Something different?

FREEEEAK OOOUUT!!! It's going to be TERRRRIBLE!

 

[Wiploc]

Jonathan Haidt's book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics And Religion, has more on the topic.

For instance, when it comes to matters of moral purity (drug use and incest, perhaps) people filling out questionnaires near a hand sanitizer dispenser tend to be temporarily more conservative than those filling out questionnaires farther away.

People are more condemning of those they judge (again, in questionnaires, maybe something like, "Did a movie studio do something morally wrong by releasing a documentary in which the director tricked people into answering questions for his movie?") if they smell farts when they're making the judgment.

 

[repoman]

That explains this meme

 

[barbos]

H. W. Bush’s famous hatred of broccoli — an unusually bitter vegetable.

Super-taster is talking here:
Broccoli  is not unusually bitter. it's just weirdly bitter.
Grapefruit is bitter and beer is ridiculously bitter.

And for what is worth I am not a conservative.

 

[untermensche]

I don't know.

I am thoroughly disgusted and lean very left.

I think being disgusted with politics and the government is something that grows over time as you see it in action and learn more about it.

Our system is incredibly corrupt.

But there is also an incredible emperor's new clothes attitude about it.

Only a thoroughly corrupted system would not have universal health insurance in 2019.

 

[Patooka]

The studies appear to be confusing correlation with causation. This is as accurate as phrenology in diagnosis.

 

[ronburgundy]

The studies appear to be confusing correlation with causation. This is as accurate as phrenology in diagnosis.

Wrong. Some of the studies use double-blinded, random assignment experiments where the presence of a "disgusting" sensory stimuli is independently manipulated and thus can be definitively attributed as the cause of the increase in conservative political attitudes in those studies.

Also, the problem with phrenology was not one of inferring causation for correlation. The problem was a total lack of even any correlation, because the variables (bumps on heads and personality traits) were not systematically measured, in contrast to all of the studies cited in this thread, some which show systematic correlations measured across varied contexts and levels of an analysis (which in itself eliminates many alternative explanations for any one single correlation), and some which are controlled experiments where causation can be definitively inferred.

The number of studies using widely varying methodology but converging on the same replicated pattern of results makes it a sound scientific basis to conclude that the experience of disgust (which overlaps a great deal with fear) plays a meaningful causal role in shaping political attitudes. It may also be the case that conservative assumptions and beliefs trigger chronic experiences of fear and disgust, thus lowering the threshold of these reactions being triggered in general, even to things not directly tied to the context of those beliefs (IOW, a kind of recursive causal loop where disgust/fear reactions and conservative ideology enhance each other).

Other than a scientifically invalid hand-wave dismissal of "correlation does not imply causation", can you offer any viable explanation for the pattern of findings across these studies?

 

[Angry Floof]

Something I have not seen in the research or expert opinions about the fear that underlies right wing authoritarian mentality is that conservatives don't acknowledge their fear. They mainly just talk about fear in terms of scapegoating, not about what they personally experience as fear or anxiety. That's a weakness. It's shameful, so block it out and pretend something else is going on.

From where I'm sitting, it's unacknowledged fear that drives conservatism, not fear in general. We're all afraid. Liberals are scared shitless, too. The difference is that we are not ashamed of fear and have no motivation to pretend something else is going on. We annoy you all by filling social media with acknowledgement of our generalized anxiety and our panic attacks and our attempts to support one another in all this.

Towards the right, you find anyone who expresses fear is most likely begging Jesus for relief from what all these evil outgroups are doing to "us" or to smite the convenient boogeyman who gave them cancer. They turn to bullies and magic in response to fear. Any other way you might suggest to them to deal with it will likely be met with accusations of being a Democrat or under Satan's influence.

A meditation group held a ten-day Vipassana retreat within a prison. Every single participant said they benefited from it, but the program was stopped by a local right wing moron organization that feared something of actual, real usefulness to human beings might cut into their magical ideological group's influence. No thought or concern at all for helping human beings in their suffering. Just a knee-jerk, programmed assignment of "evil" to practices that didn't have Jesus stamped all over them.

I've been wondering for some time how it would be possible to help conservatives be less scared, but I'm at a loss. Self reflection and honest acknowledgement of real experiences are the first step in healing, but those things seem to be mortal sins. When it comes down to severe personal suffering, almost any conservative will reach out to what might bring relief, even things they've denounced in the past. It just depends on how much it hurts them personally.

Most of the abortions in the U.S. are requested by Christian women. Christian Scientists go to doctors secretly when desperate. Anti-government dogmatists go to Canada for medical care if that's the only option for them.

My own sister prays and complains about hypertension, but even just simple breathing exercises as recommended by Western doctors are, to her, associated with false gods and so she won't hear of it. I wonder how sick she'd have to get before she'd be willing to try a simple breathing exercise. It's possible she tries unauthorized solutions in private. After all, appearances for the ideological community is an important element among right wingers.

It takes a lot of personal pain and suffering for right wing authoritarian personalities to be honest about being human. Unfortunately, they are willing to drag the entire world into atrocity before they have the conscience to change their minds.

 

[untermensche]

The right suffers from a narrow sense of empathy.

They are not subhuman.

They can care about some humans.

But not many.

 

[zorq]

So the takeaway I am getting from this is that the next time I visit a polling booth, I can expect it to smell like shit thanks to the conservative voters that used it before me and are hoping to influence my voting choices.

 

[J842P]

The studies appear to be confusing correlation with causation. This is as accurate as phrenology in diagnosis.

No, they don't appear to be doing that at all.