As midterm elections in the United States draw near, psychologists continue to probe a deceptively basic issue: whether a person’s tendency to recoil predicts a socially conservative outlook, or whether political values determine the things that provoke revulsion. A review of 24 studies concluded that respondents who said they were easily disgusted more often endorsed socially conservative positions. Still, that body of work has not established which way influence runs, and physiological experiments have sometimes contradicted survey results.
- Key Point: The 24-study review associated stronger self-reported disgust with more socially conservative attitudes.
- Key Point: A 2009 instrument, the Three-Domain Disgust Scale, divides the emotion into pathogen, sexual and moral categories.
- Key Point: Among 632 US adults, sexual disgust predicted conservatism no matter how body-aware respondents were; moral disgust did so only for those less attuned to internal signals.
- Key Point: Yoel Inbar calls the disgust-ideology evidence weaker than he would prefer, and the newest research found no meaningful pathogen-disgust tie to conservative opinions.
Evolution, separate domains and contagion talk
Revulsion is not a single reflex. The scale separates pathogen disgust, prompted by infection hazards such as spoiled food, vomit or bodily waste; sexual disgust, prompted by specific sexual acts or contexts; and moral disgust, prompted by betrayal, cruelty and other wrongdoing. Scholars still disagree over whether moral disgust is bodily revulsion or ethical condemnation. One hypothesis holds that people highly alert to germs and illness may be drawn to conventional social rules.
Yoel Inbar, a psychologist at Canada’s University of British Columbia, told DW that evolution partly explains the pathogen dimension.
We think that it evolved in part to reduce exposure to things that could make you sick.
Inbar added that staying away from possible infection may also mean forgoing unfamiliar experiences.
Some people are more on the cautious conservative side and some people are more on the exploring risk-taking side when it comes to pathogen exposure.
Images of contamination have also surfaced in campaign language. Early in his 2024 presidential run, Donald Trump used contagion-tinged wording about immigrants and repeatedly said they were:
poisoning the blood of our country.
Trump has also called himself a germaphobe. Even so, Inbar cautions that research connecting disgust sensitivity to conservative politics is not settled.
We have hypotheses. I don’t know that we have as strong of evidence as I would like.
Divergent triggers, and the role of bodily perception
Disgust is not owned by one side. A 2020 paper called ‘Is Disgust a Conservative Emotion?’ found that the two camps recoil at different things. Conservatives, usually Republicans, reported more revulsion at sexual conduct and drug use; liberals, usually Democrats, reported more at animal cruelty and pollution. Yet general susceptibility showed no obvious ideological divide. Earlier experiments hinted that conservatives reacted more strongly, physically, to pictures that were frightening or disgusting, partly tracked through sweating. Later work, including a 2020 study by Bert Bakker, a political psychologist at the University of Amsterdam, had trouble reproducing that pattern. Survey-based research, meanwhile, has usually found that more conservative respondents describe themselves as quicker to feel disgust.
Manos Tsakiris, who works at Royal Holloway and at a University of London centre devoted to the politics of feelings, posed the puzzle to DW.
If bodily reactions don’t differ across political groups, why do feelings?
With Mariana von Mohr, Tsakiris examined interoception: the way people register internal cues such as hunger, breathing or a quickened heartbeat. It is often described as an extra sense, next to sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell, balance and body position.
A bodily signal doesn’t arrive with a label attached. We have to notice it and make sense of it.
The pair asked 632 US adults whether they paid attention to and trusted bodily signals, a trait called interoceptive sensibility. Sexual disgust went with conservatism regardless of perceived body awareness. For moral disgust, the conservative association appeared only among people who reported weaker awareness of internal signals. Tsakiris was especially struck that body awareness by itself had no political connection.
People who are highly attuned to their bodies were neither more liberal nor more conservative.
Measurement questions and a tentative verdict
Inbar doubts that every disgust domain is equally informative for political research. Inbar and Joshua Tybur, who helped design the scale, tend to favour pathogen disgust over sexual disgust, since sexual-disgust items may already carry conservative views about sex.
It’s almost asking people the same thing twice.
The new study detected no significant association between pathogen disgust and conservative attitudes. Inbar would like the body-awareness findings retested with predictions fixed in advance. At present, he rates them no better than ‘suggestive at best.’
Overall, the evidence describes a limited and uncertain influence, not a political master switch. Self-reports repeatedly connect disgust sensitivity with social conservatism, but the direction of cause, the importance of bodily perception and the distinction between pathogen and sexual disgust remain unsettled. Before another polarized campaign, the prudent reading is that revulsion may tint political judgment without deciding it.