The Psychology (and Politics) of Disgust | Kathleen McAuliffe

How easily grossed out are you? Your sensitivity to disgust reveals more about you than you'd probably be comfortable with, from how you'll vote in this election to your potential to be a cold-blooded killer. Kathleen McAuliffe's book is This Is Your Brain on Parasites: How Tiny Creatures Manipulate Our Behavior and Shape Society goo.gl/qgOI62
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Similar parts of the brain - there's a lot of overlap in how we process both visceral disgust and moral disgust. Psychopaths - needless to say they're these cold-blooded killers are over representative in many of our high security jails. And these individuals show damage to many of the same circuits that are involved in disgust. Another group of individuals, although they're not predatory but people with Huntington's disease it also damages some of the circuits that are involved in disgust. People with Huntington's disease tend not to be empathetic and they think that this is related to these circuits being damaged. And they're almost unique in that they experience almost no visceral disgust whatsoever. So somebody with Huntington's disease, for example, would think nothing of picking up feces with their bare hands. So there is this sort of very interesting interrelationship, at least in the brain, between visceral and moral disgust.
A little known fact is that conservatives are more disgust sensitive. There's a huge variation acrostic populations in how disgust sensitive people are. There's actually standardized scales that measure, for example, the questionnaire you fill out and it will ask you questions about like how revolted you would be If you stepped on dog poop or if you saw a cockroach on pizza or a dirty toilet. And as a result of filling out these questionnaires they've been able to look to see if there's parallels between how disgust sensitive someone is and how conservative they are. And indeed there is a correlation. And probably the reason for that is because, again, the conservatives if you kind of really breakdown their belief systems they tend to have conservative sexual values. So, for example, concepts like virginity pledges are ideas that they're fond of. They also tend to be more opposed to immigration and foreigners are a leading source, at least in centuries past, foreigners were a leading source of exotic germs for which we had no natural defenses. So it's speculated that that could be another factor behind why people who are more conservative in their political ideology why they tend to be opposed to immigration.
Conservatives also tend to be very tradition bound. They tend to be a little bit more rigid about following religious doctrine. And again, a lot of religious practices may help to protect against infection. So that's the leading theory as to why you see this association. But in general, even in large survey studies they've shown this link between germophobia and xenophobia. So, for example, there was a paper actually that's about to be published and I think they looked at 2000 Danes and 1200 Americans, representative samples from both countries. And they found that opposition to immigration increased in direct proportion to the disgust sensitivity of the individual.
Another group did a study of 25,000 Americans. The study was done at the time of the 2008 presidential election between John McCain, a more conservative candidate, of course, and Barack Obama. And they found that the more disgust sensitive the person the more likely they would vote for John McCain. And they actually showed the proportion of votes that went to McCain in each state. It was based on the average disgust sensitivity of the state based on individual respondents to the survey.