Disgust Sensitivity and the Neurophysiology of Left-Right Political Orientations | Hacker News Reader

Disgust Sensitivity and the Neurophysiology of Left-Right Political Orientations

journals.plos.org

52 pointsrbanffy31 comments

Disgust is a challenging emotion to study because it is so intertwined in the brain. Moral "disgust" activates the same region as the "man eating a can of worms" example in the article. It activates the same facial expression. Even our language fails to separate the emotions at times as dis-gust (i.e., gustatory) can be in reference to disgusting behavior. VS Ramachandran discussed this in a lecture but I can't find a link.

Oddly before opening the article I had assumed it was about how moral "disgust" is positively correlated with left-leaning. But then the study was referring to digestive disgust which appears positively correlated with right-leaning.

Side note, the most disgusted I recall feeling in both senses of the word was hearing a military leader describe a delicious a piece of chocolate cake while simultaneously describing the bombing he ordered on a foreign country. He could describe the cake in great detail but he forgot what country we had bombed the previous day. My right leaning friends didn't see this as a big deal.

As an extra data point, I have eaten worms on a survival trip and was fine with it and I never really liked chocolate cake. So maybe this line of research has merit.

>Oddly before opening the article I had assumed it was about how moral "disgust" is positively correlated with left-leaning. But then the study was referring to digestive disgust which appears positively correlated with right-leaning.

Actually, even moral disgust is positively correlated with right leaning folks. The Righteous Mind (https://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics-Relig...) is a great read that covers the research on the topic.

Yes, I should not have implied otherwise since how one leans is really a reflection of how one defines their morals, not a deficiency of morals.

This general topic reminds me of Jonathan Haidt's TED talk on the moral motivations of liberals and conservatives:

https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_on_the_moral_mind

A couple years ago there was a quiz going around based on this concept. You answer 27 non-political questions and the quiz guesses your political leaning. http://www.metafilter.com/161320/27-non-political-questions-...

More direct link (took me a moment to find it on that page): http://chartsme.com/

I just took it. 85% conservative it says. But the fact is I am more like 85% liberal.

Also, it's a little bit warped because some of the questions would evoke a different emotion than disgust, but you are required to categorize it as a disgust level.

>I just took it. 85% conservative it says. But the fact is I am more like 85% liberal.

Not poking at you as a person sincerely.

By whose standard/spectrum? I'm fairly liberal by US standards but fairly conservative by a lot of others. I have generally found unidimensional measures of political leanings really unuseful because of their summativeness.

...Think I can see what you mean.

> "I would rather eat a piece of fruit than a piece of paper."

The hell kind of question is that? Of course I'd rather eat a piece of fruit!

According to this I'm only 59% conservative which seems on the low side. Maybe today's standards are different from when this test was created.

I'm 49-51 on that test, but that is not how my friends would describe me (US).

I do like to think I approach politics more intellectually than emotionally.

We're you 49/51 before or after you read about it in this thread?

Presumably both.

Are you seriously questioning potentially biasing factors affecting an internet quiz?

Jordan Peterson describes the archetypal left/right axis as being something like Nurturing Mother/Fear of The Snake. It certainly makes sense as being a fundamental axis given that both are beneficial and both are harmful and a balance has to exist within a population.

I think modern times probably need nurturing mothers (and fathers) more than fear of snakes.

I think modern times probably need fear of snakes more than nurturing mothers (or fathers).

That's why we're in huge student loan crisis, and why we just left the housing crisis. SNAKES!

Interesting. I don't see the right axis as involving any fear. I see it as recognizing the inviolability of individual liberty above all else. And in doing so, having a great deal of trust and confidence in society to do the right thing - as long as liberty is truly and completely protected. Conversely, I see the left axis as being driven by the fear that society cannot do the right thing on its own and therefore morality must be codified in to law that requires violent force to coerce society in to obeying.

In case anyone's unaware, Jordan Peterson is a notable critic of "political correctness" and mainstream academia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan_Peterson

It is interesting that in nearly all articles on this (by now fairly well established) correlation, it is phrased as "higher than normal disgust sensitivity by people with right-of-center beliefs", not "lower than normal disgust sensitivity by people with left-of-center beliefs". It's like academia regards right of center political beliefs as a disease that needs curing...

You were on track to making an interesting point and then went off course. It's not unreasonable to conclude that academia has a left-of-center bias, it is unreasonable to conclude that left-of-center biased academics feel right-of-center beliefs are something that needs curing.

I expect that you wouldn't be receiving down votes if you had omitted that last sentence.

I expect you are correct in that. I wonder if a similar mechanism inside academia could be an explanation for the very phenomenon I was wondering about. Thanks for pointing that out!

> It is interesting that in nearly all articles on this (by now fairly well established) correlation, it is phrased as "higher than normal disgust sensitivity by people with right-of-center beliefs", not "lower than normal disgust sensitivity by people with left-of-center beliefs". It's like academia regards right of center political beliefs as a disease that needs curing...

Maybe I've missed it (I scanned the article) but I don't see where it says that people with left of centre beliefs have lower than normal disgust sensitivity.

Wikipedia [1] doesn't mention any such symmetry either.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disgust#Political_orientation

Disgust is an emotion; lack of disgust is not. You can only really measure how highly a person responds to disgust, not how highly they respond to anti-disgust. This article does not even use the term "normal", however? I agree that it would be problematic to describe a population's response as "not normal" but I don't see it here.

Academic writing/human thinking teaches that it is clearer to identify variables that increase things than those that do not.

You can make this personal but really this is just how you normally report scientific results.

Both leftists and rightists have their strong shares of adorable and of disgusting stuff. I'd rather be a republican if not all the religious, nazi and false-moralist BS they use to promote. I'd rather be a democrat if not all the extra regulation, taxation, bureaucracy, hypocrisy/hyper-polite-correctness etc.

I think there is likely a stronger correlation to wealth rather than politics. When people have it really good, they get sort of mentally spoiled by getting everything their way. So, when they encounter something that is not to their liking, the reaction is stronger because they've been able to successfully avoid it for longer. The disgusting thing threatens their on-a-higher-level equilibria and therefore is a stronger threat to them than it would be to a lower class person who has to encounter it more often. Less well-off people who have to get their hands dirty more often build up mental callouses to the grosser aspects of life, like handling compost, cleaning wounds, etc.

Reminds one of David Pizarro's TED talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/david_pizarro_the_strange_politics...

> of the 16 Wilson-Patterson items, gay marriage is the only issue that is significantly related (p<.05) to electrodermal response

My emphasis. Alternative headline:

"People less likely to stick to an individual party line item when it actually affects them."

Echoes of the Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt.

That didn't age well...

Anyone can come up with a correlation report. But if you really want to call yourself a scientist, you better really be careful about drawing political conclusions, especially when there's no way to actually "prove" your conclusion is true, unlike other fields of science where they're more objectively measure-able.

Here's a much better piece about how disgust sensitivity affects societal change https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...

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