A study of U.S. Democrats and Republicans found that moral disgust tracked political identity mainly among people reporting lower awareness of bodily sensations, narrowing a contested link between emotion and ideology.
Published Aug. 6 in Politics and the Life Sciences, the study analyzed questionnaire responses from 632 adults: 321 Democrats and 311 Republicans. The researchers recruited 636 people and excluded four responses from the analysis. Independents were not eligible.
University of Kent lecturer in social and affective neuroscience Mariana Von Mohr and Royal Holloway professor of psychology Manos Tsakiris asked participants to rate their reactions to situations involving potential infection, sex and moral violations. Participants also described their awareness of sensations inside their bodies and placed themselves on a political spectrum.
Among respondents reporting less bodily awareness, higher moral disgust scores aligned with more conservative ideological self-placement and a greater likelihood of identifying as Republican. The researchers did not find a statistically reliable version of that pattern among respondents reporting greater awareness. Bodily awareness on its own showed no significant link to either political measure.
The distinction between types of disgust mattered. Sexual disgust had a separate association with more conservative identification, while disgust tied to potential infection did not. When the researchers pooled the three types into an overall disgust score, its interaction with bodily awareness met the statistical threshold for party identification but fell short for ideological self-placement. The moral-disgust interaction met that threshold for both.
Earlier research has produced a mixed picture. A 2013 review of 24 studies found an association between disease avoidance and social conservatism, while identifying publication bias that may have overstated its strength. In a later set of five studies, the political relationship varied with the situations respondents assessed. When a question asked about disgust without identifying what prompted it, researchers found no association with political orientation.
Von Mohr and Tsakiris suggest that meanings people learn to attach to disgust may help account for their results, but the study did not test that explanation. It recorded what participants reported, not their physical reactions. The findings cannot establish whether disgust shapes political identity or political identity shapes what people find disgusting. The researchers called for future work that measures bodily responses alongside questionnaire answers.
