Ewww politics: disgust and ideology.

• Author: Bailey, Ronald
• Position: Citings - Brief article

ARE YOU easily grossed out? Then you might be a political conservative. That's the suggestion from a new study published in the scientific journal PLoS ONE by a team of researchers led by University of Nebraska political scientists Kevin Smith and John Hibbing. The October study, "Disgust Sensitivity and the Neurophysiology of Left-Right Political Orientations," tested a group of people whose political predilections had been previously identified on a survey. While hooked up to an apparatus that measures skin conductance, the subjects were shown a series of disgusting (a man eating writhing worms) and pleasant images (a bowl of fruit).As predicted, political conservatives tended to have a much stronger physiological...