EMOTION AND THE STRUCTURE OF POLITICAL MEANING

Emotion influences behavior and decision making through its powerful effect on thoughts, behavior, motivation, and attachment. So far, most of the emotion and political behavior scholarship has focused on the prediction of ideology or attitudes of the mass publics (Marcus, Neuman, and MacKuen Reference Marcus, Neuman and MacKuen2000; Neumann et al. Reference Neumann, Marcus, Crigler and MacKuen2007). However, early and recent debates in the political science literature have focused on whether general valence theories of affect adequately characterized political activation and discourse, or whether more discrete models of emotion would prove more accurate (e.g., Neumann et al. Reference Neumann, Marcus, Crigler and MacKuen2007; Petersen, Slothuus, and Togeby Reference Petersen, Slothuus and Togeby2010). This debate is not trivial; rather, the specific nature of the emotion explored holds tremendous import for the political and institutional consequences we explore.

Various emotions exert important but potentially different public policy consequences; different emotions influence the interpersonal nature of how people work together in a democracy in different ways. Because more than one emotion exists, different emotions can pull in different directions, may exert their influence in one area of public policy and not in others, or become differentially activated in the face of particular triggers. For example, anger exerts a different effect than fear (Lerner and Keltner Reference Lerner and Keltner2000) and encourages more optimistic assessments of future outcomes and more top-down decision-making strategies. As a result, the effect of anger on public policy may be different when we contemplate war than when we assess prospects for health-care reform.

Recently, the nature of political debate has increasingly centered on one emotion, disgust, yet explications of disgust have been largely absent from the scholarly literature on political debate. Indeed, certain emotions, such as fear or anger, have more to do with the specifics of political attitudes and preferences, while other emotions, such as disgust, may disproportionately affect other domains of evaluation. Disgust primarily appears to affect how we perceive and understand the nature of morality (Koleva et al. Reference Koleva, Graham, Iyer, Ditto and Haidt2012). In this way, particular issues may prime specific emotions; for example, talk of war may heighten the sense of fear or anger among certain individuals, while discussions of gay marriage may trigger disgust among others. However, the exact same idea simultaneously may trigger other emotions, such as happiness, among different members of society. In this way, the same topic can generate vastly different emotional responses, and thus entrain entirely divergent decision-making strategies, depending on a myriad of personal, biological, and environmental factors in an individual's personal history.

In the past, emotion has been typically explored within the realms best suited to analyze the topics of greatest substantive interest to scholars, such as vote choice; this work has provided important insights in these areas (Brader Reference Brader2006; Marcus, Neuman, and MacKuen Reference Marcus, Neuman and MacKuen2000; Neumann et al. Reference Neumann, Marcus, Crigler and MacKuen2007). This research has proved critically important for understanding policy positions, but it has not enlightened the underlying nature of the public policy making process, or shown how certain topics trigger variant emotions among different people, which in turn shape perception, stimulate reactions, and structure responses. Yet these factors strongly influence the interpersonal aspects of political negotiation and disagreement, including processes of communication, group affiliation, and the ways in which personal feelings and relationships influence the interpretation of political meaning.

Until recently, the mechanism for explaining underlying emotional differences in the psychology of morality in the academic literature did not exist, but now we have indicators that such a motivator lies in the emotion of disgust in particular (Pizarro, Inbar, and Helion Reference Pizarro, Inbar and Helion2011). Disgust has emerged as a critical force distinguishing conservatives and liberals in its elicitation, interpretation, and influence (Haidt and Graham Reference Haidt and Graham2007; Inbar et al. Reference Inbar, Pizarro, Iyer and Haidt2011). Experiences of disgust dramatically affect the dimensions along which individuals assess moral values. In fact, disgust encompasses the cognitive, emotional, and physical properties that are predictably divergent across ideological positions and infuses evaluations of morality along dimensions of purity and sanctity in conservatives but not in liberals. In its most recent instantiation in the hard sciences, much attention has been placed on this emotion (Haidt and Graham Reference Haidt and Graham2007; Haidt et al. Reference Haidt, Rozin, McCauley and Imada1997); indeed, disgust has received widespread attention for its importance in structuring ideology, morality, and political preferences (Inbar, Pizarro and Bloom Reference Inbar, Pizarro and Bloom2009; Inbar et al. Reference Inbar, Knobe, Pizarro and Bloom2009; Inbar and Pizarro Reference Inbar and Pizarro2009).

In the past, scholarly attention to the origins of political division primarily concentrated on individual differences in policy preferences. Some may argue that political divides reflect power differentials, and we do not suggest otherwise. However, it is not just that political opponents may not start off on level playing fields. Rather, we suggest they may be playing entirely different games on the same field; one team may be playing soccer while the other is playing baseball, and yet both are on the same field believing they are playing the same game but the “other side” is the one failing to play by the “rules” of the game. The sense that the other side is cheating, or playing dirty, incites aversion on both sides. Unfortunately, neither side realizes that although they are playing side by side on the same field, each side is actually playing a very different game with very different rules, goals, and values. Each side remains unaware of the other side's equal lack of awareness, like a hall of mirrors in which each side, seeing only their own reflection, experiences the images as though they were realistic representations of the other.

These differences often fuel the already hostile nature of contentious political issues. Personal and antagonistic rhetoric clearly signals frustration on all sides of the debate. However, the consistent use of visceral, often physical, terms for signaling displeasure has largely gone unnoticed in explaining the division among ideologues. Yet, this language and imagery does not emerge by accident. Rather, it occurs precisely because people use the emotion of disgust to signal rejection in the face of objects, events, and people they consider objectionable or contaminated. Invoking associations and triggers associated with disgusting things in a political context provides a communication strategy to inform allies that allowing particular thoughts or people or policies into one's life can lead to unknown negative consequences, much like infection can lead to disease, which, after it takes hold, can threaten the life of its victim. Why do some people see illness in the same place others discover cure? Indeed, some people fear botulism from improperly canned food, while others seek out injecting it to hold the signs of aging artificially at bay; some see abortion as abomination while others view it as a sometimes necessary requirement.

The fact that individuals may be less influenced by the rational cost-and-benefit calculations on which economists often rely to predict decision making than by other normative or emotional factors hardly constitutes a novel recognition (Marcus et al. Reference Marcus, Sullivan, Theiss-Morse and Wood1995; Quattrone and Tversky Reference Quattrone and Tversky1988). However, the mechanisms that drive these alternative forces have not been fully explicated. These issues receive new attention in light of recent research in neuroscience and psychology that highlights the links between moral judgment and emotion in general and concerns about purity and disgust in particular. Indeed, emotions such as disgust even mediate what is considered economically fair (Moretti and di Pellegrino Reference Moretti and di Pellegrino2010). This response is important because previous work on emotion in politics has focused on either the influence of emotion on the opinions of the mass public (Brader Reference Brader2006; Lupia and Menning Reference Lupia and Menning2009; Marcus, Neuman, and MacKuen Reference Marcus, Neuman and MacKuen2000; Marcus Reference Marcus2002; Neumann et al. Reference Neumann, Marcus, Crigler and MacKuen2007) or on the substantive nature of differences in policy position independent of emotional charge.

Here, we offer an initial resolution to explain how and why people come to play different political games. We review evidence, heretofore largely unknown to political science, that shows that people literally interpret the same information differently and evaluate policies, people, and actions using different dimensions of values by assigning different psychological weights to the value of purity that, in turn elicit different degrees of disgust. Personal disgust then launches a series of physiological and cognitive mechanisms that distance the disgusting object from the recipient. These psychological propensities operate to keep potentially harmful objects and individuals from potentially contaminating the disgusted person. These strategies, designed to keep the observer safe from injury, increase resistance, acrimony, and intolerance toward the offensive object or person. Although links between democracy and disgust in the political science literature (Brown Reference Brown1993; Hancock Reference Hancock2004; Krause Reference Krause2008; Norval Reference Norval2008; Sabl Reference Sabl2002; Thiele Reference Thiele2006) have been considered in the subfield of political theory, the relationship between moral judgments, emotion, and substantive political decision making in the rest of political science has been seldom discussed. Rather, the discussion on the importance of disgust in politics has largely occurred without the input of political scientists.

DISGUST IN THE STUDY OF POLITICS

As we intimated earlier, research on disgust has been widely circulated in high-profile science publications, but this research has found less purchase in political science. Some work has focused on theoretical applications of emotion to political decision making more broadly construed. For example, Marcus (Reference Marcus2002) addresses how disgust may shape democratic politics and MacKuen et al. (Reference MacKuen, Wolak, Keele and Marcus2010) provide an empirical discussion of how the larger phenomenon of aversion plays a role in their theory of affective intelligence. In each of these constructs, however, disgust constitutes one aspect of a larger posited affective state they label aversion. Along with anxiety and enthusiasm, aversion represents one of the affective states that can drive and influence political choice and action. To return to discrete versus more general aspects of emotion, however, aversion can also encompass emotional states such as anger, which we understand to embody a distinct affective state from disgust. To explore the manifestation, operation, and functioning of disgust more specifically in its impact on public discourse, in this article we concentrate on disgust, not aversion. So far, however, only one previous work has delineated some of the implications of disgust in a manner similar to the way we do here. Specifically, Smith et al. (Reference Smith, Oxley, Hibbing, Alford and Hibbing2009) have previously provided the most direct exploration of this topic and should be credited with having introduced recent research on this concept to the more general political science audience.

In addition, we note that any model that locates the source of political preference and action in a single affective state, however powerful, risks underestimating the complexity of the interactive process that drives outcomes of interest. Personality traits may have enduring influence over time, but transient emotional states, such as anger or disgust, while often coinciding with a particular ideology or personality trait nonetheless constantly interact with other, and often divergent, emotional states so that various processes remain concurrently operative. Whereas our ultimate goal is to explore the political conditions under which disgust is dominant and environmental forces either weaken or strengthen its influence, in this article we introduce its significance to lay a critically important physiological and psychological foundation for ideological divergence. We celebrate those authors who have begun to interrogate specific moral emotions in political context (e.g., Petersen, Slothuus, and Togeby Reference Petersen, Slothuus and Togeby2010) and we contribute to their discussions by concentrating specifically on the influence of disgust on political ideology and democratic discourse.

Existing scholarship on disgust has focused on its ability to predict political differences across left–right dimensions. This focus on whether or not disgust affects such variance has yet to be fully exploited for its greater value. We suggest that such difference delves much deeper than mere differences along a simple political continuum. Indeed, in this regard, conceptualizing ideology along a more two-dimensional space and characterizing economic and cultural issues along separate dimensions (Kriesi Reference Kriesi2007) is helpful. Disgust prompts people to literally think, and evaluate, along different dimensions within any given issue; disgust triggers different cognitive mechanisms of evaluation so that people view and interpret the very same information differently (Gray et al. Reference Gray, Young, Barker, Curtis and Gibson1997; Moll et al. Reference Moll, de Oliveira-Souza, Moll, Ignácio, Bramati, Caparelli-Dáquer and Eslinger2005); people focus on different preferences in its presence than in its absence. Distinct neural systems appear to manifest for different components of morality (Parkinson et al. Reference Parkinson, Sinnott-Armstrong, Koralus, Mendelovici, McGeer and Wheatley2011); Moll et al. (Reference Moll, de Oliveira-Souza, Moll, Ignácio, Bramati, Caparelli-Dáquer and Eslinger2005) found that areas of the prefrontal and orbital frontal brain regions appear critical in rendering moral judgments and making automatic assessment of morality with regard to social events. Research using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) located the origin of disgust in the anterior insular cortex (Phillips et al. Reference Phillips, Young and Senior1997). The basal ganglia may be implicated in disgust as well (Gray et al. Reference Gray, Young, Barker, Curtis and Gibson1997). In fact, disgust provides an exceptionally powerful foundation on which acrimony in debate escalates. Given the same information, people who experience disgust see things differently than those who do not (Phillips et al. Reference Phillips, Young and Senior1997). This phenomenon does not result from different preferences or derive from diverse childhood socialization, but represents a truly inherent difference in psychophysiological experience. These physiological differences are similar to those reported by Oxley et al. (Reference Oxley, Smith, Hibbing, Miller, Alford, Hatemi and Hibbing2008) in their study showing that conservatives demonstrated a greater physiological response to threat than liberals, while leaving open the question of whether ideology or physiology leads the charge. In other words, different emotional elicitations, whether anxiety or disgust, entrain more than a simple difference on a political left-right ideological dimension. In this sense, we point to a much deeper underlying latent cognitive-emotive information and categorization process, whereby different individuals literally see the world differently, and evaluate input along different dimensions. These mechanisms, in turn, have critical implications for political discourse and for the evaluation of political “others” (Kristeva Reference Kristeva1982).

We do not claim that disgust represents the only emotion worth investigating for its impact on political outcomes of interest. However, as an emotion, disgust remains critical for explicating the relevant processes involved in political debate, but has yet to be incorporated into mainstream political science analysis. Understanding the nature of disgust can also illuminate the dynamics and consequences of public discourse, deliberation, and representation to break down the behavioral implications of these findings within an interpersonal context. As individuals model and replicate particular predispositions, so too do leaders; these attitudes can be reflected in the actions of states as well. In this way, we can begin to understand how emotion fits into our political decision-making strategies and responses to those who have opposite views.

The findings on disgust, summarized here, argue that disgust is a critical emotion for understanding the nature and character of democratic debate because it is a discrete affective state that ties the moral dimensions on which people evaluate others' attitudes, preferences, and behaviors. We then discuss the important ways disgust interacts with political ideology. We argue that it is not that conservatives are heartless or that liberals are sexually indiscriminate, but the nature of the relationship between political ideology and morality remains subtle and nuanced. If political opponents strive to overcome pernicious divides characterized by internecine fractures, greater transparency in understanding the foundations of each other's judgments can aid reconciliation across such chasms.

THE EMOTION OF DISGUST

Traditionally overlooked as an important emotion for understanding the nature of social behavior, disgust originally constituted one of Darwin's six basic emotions. It possesses cross-cultural recognition in signature facial expression (Curtis and Biran Reference Curtis and Biran2001; Ekman and Friesen Reference Ekman and Friesen1977) patterned by a wrinkling of the nose and a down-turning of the mouth, as well as physiological correlates, including lowered blood pressure and sympathetic nervous system activation (for a review see Smith et al. Reference Smith, Oxley, Hibbing, Alford and Hibbing2009). The definitive behavioral response involves stopping or ceasing any approach toward the object eliciting disgust (Haidt et al. Reference Haidt, Rozin, McCauley and Imada1997).

Most of the factors that elicit disgust seem to coalesce around a few broad categories. Curtis and Biran (Reference Curtis and Biran2001) identifies five basic categories which include bodily excretions; decaying and spoiled food; particular things such as toilets which are assumed to be contaminated; certain categories of “other” people; and violations of morality (e.g., homosexuality) or social processes. The category of moral disgust, similar to what Moll et al. (Reference Moll, de Oliveira-Souza, Moll, Ignácio, Bramati, Caparelli-Dáquer and Eslinger2005) categorize as “indignation,” finds the universal inclusion of politicians, along with injustice, prejudice, vulgarity, and abuse of power. These categorizations build on earlier typologies that suggest that physical contact with unpleasant or unknown people evokes disgust (Rozin and Fallon Reference Rozin and Fallon1987), as does uncertainty and violations of social rules (Miller Reference Miller1997; Rozin et al. Reference Rozin, Lowery, Imada and Haidt1999b).

Harris and Fiske (Reference Harris and Fiske2006) found that individuals who are judged as both low warmth and low competence, such as drug addicts and homeless people, differentially elicited disgust. Their work demonstrated greater activation in the insula and amygdala of subjects judging such individuals and less activation in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). This suggests that these individuals may be perceived as less human because judgment of disgusting objects similarly fails to activate the mPFC. Other work by this team (Reference Harris and Fiske2007) shows that forcing subjects to make individuating judgments about extreme out-group members who elicit disgust (age, food preference) raises activation of the mPFC, indicating at least one mechanism by which individuation can reduce disgust.

Haidt et al. (Reference Haidt, Rozin, McCauley and Imada1997) delineate seven categories that overlap with Curtis and Biran's characterization incorporating food, animals, body products, sexual deviance, body envelope violations, poor hygiene, and death.Footnote ⁶ Biological and cross cultural validation suggests that disgust rests on far more than constructed cultural norms.Footnote ⁷ Recognized for his seminal contribution to the area, Paul Rozin indicated that the most universal aspects of disgust related to aversion to waste, and, in particular, oral incorporation of anything associated with waste (Rozin and Fallon Reference Rozin and Fallon1987).Footnote ⁸ It is easier to extinguish conditioned disgust reactions to some objects, like flowers, than to others, which commonly elicit disgust, such as spiders and snakes. Not surprisingly, it also appears easier to condition disgust to some objects, such as feces, than to say, a food like chocolate (Mineka and Cook Reference Mineka and Cook1993). Before dismissing this last finding as obvious, remember that such a finding runs counter to all the standard behaviorist literature that both assumes and argues that any object can be paired equally well and easily with any unconditioned stimulus to produce equivalent conditioned responses, much as Pavlov's dogs learned to salivate in response to the bell presented just prior to food during learning trials. Yet introspection clearly supports the finding that some things more easily elicit disgust than others.

Several theories attempt to explain the development and evolution of disgust. In his cultural examination of the history of disgust, Miller (Reference Miller1997) argued that disgust developed as a mechanism to defend both the body and soul against various forms of pollution, including moral violations. Rozin et al. (Reference Rozin, Haidt and McCauley1999a) argued that disgust operated according to two laws. The first relates to the contiguity of contagion, whereby people believe that after an object has come into contact with something that has been contaminated, that second object must also be considered contaminated. So, for example, after dog feces have touched a plate, that plate is thereafter treated as similarly polluted. The second involves similarity in such a way that appearance becomes reality; for example, things that resemble contaminated objects also elicit disgust, as when plastic objects shaped like feces arouse aversion.

In related work, Rozin et al. (Reference Rozin, Haidt and McCauley1999a) described how primates, including bonobos, chimpanzees, and humans remain supremely sensitive to violations of social order, especially defections in dyadic relationships. They argued that this characteristic forms the foundation of human morality and informs our notions of loyalty. Obviously, this characteristic aversion to dyadic defection holds tremendous social and political consequences. For example, this reaction can explain, in part, the disgust that can arise when spouses cheat. It also illuminates the social sanctioning that occurred against Linda Tripp, who in turning in Monica Lewinsky, received little purchase for arguing that she was doing the “right” thing by uncovering the president's adultery precisely because people were disgusted by her disloyalty to a friend whose trust she exploited.

Rozin et al. (Reference Rozin, Haidt and McCauley1999a) argued that disgust serves the function of protecting people from harm by extending aversion from the physical to the social world, treating social parasites as though they embodied the contamination inherent in physically aversive objects. By treating social objects of disgust in a manner similar to physical objects that elicit disgust, such perpetrators are avoided, punishing them while protecting those who quarantine the undesirables. In this way, Rozin et al. (Reference Rozin, Lowery, Imada and Haidt1999b) suggested that disgust helps police the portals of the body and soul that remain vulnerable to either physical or social forms of contamination. As Curtis and Biran (Reference Curtis and Biran2001, 23) argue: “If the selective force of the pathogens was sufficient to modify our physiology, it is reasonable to suggest that the same forces were at work on our behavioral traits.”

Rozin et al. (1999) proposed that three basic emotions of anger, contempt, and disgust were differentially activated by violations of three particular moral codes. Anger emerged in reaction to violations of autonomy and individual rights, contempt became aroused in response to violations of community including authority and hierarchy such as status violations, and, importantly, disgust manifests when violations of so-called divinity, referring to purity and sanctity, occurred. In this way, moral dimensions related to social and religious contamination selectively elicit disgust.

The most convincing explanations for the emergence and maintenance of disgust rest on evolutionary logic. Early work by Nesse and Williams (Reference Nesse and Williams1995) suggested that natural selection designed disgust to ensure that people avoided potential sources of infection and contagion. Curtis and Biran (Reference Curtis and Biran2001) demonstrated that in all but one case, the mechanisms of transmission for major infectious diseases (i.e., food-borne illness) all correlated with one of more categories of factors that elicited disgust (i.e., rotten food). Pinker (Reference Pinker1998) similarly argued that natural selection crafted disgust as the operative psychological mechanism by which individuals came to experience an “intuitive microbiology,” prompting a differential aversion to those objects or people who were most likely to cause infection, contamination, or disease.

FROM DISGUST TO THE PSYCHOLOGY OF POLITICAL ORIENTATION

How does disgust influence important political factors? Recent research in psychology implicates disgust as the instigating mechanism that exerts a predictable influence on responses to particular political policies, possibly through the direct and indirect mediating mechanism of a left-right political orientation (Haidt Reference Haidt2012).Footnote ⁹ One of the ways it may accomplish this is by regulating responses to in-group attraction and out-group hostility (Hodson and Costello Reference Hodson and Costello2007; Jost Reference Jost, Napier, Thorisdottir, Gosling, Palfai and Ostafin2007; Skitka, Bauman, and Sargis Reference Skitka, Bauman and Sargis2005). As noted earlier, this work fits well within the burgeoning investigation of the influence of emotion on decision making, which focuses on discrete emotions such as anger, and examines how these emotions can bias certain judgments, such as those involving risk (Lerner and Keltner Reference Lerner and Keltner2000).

Note that this relationship provides a clear link between the specific nature of emotional elicitation and out-group discrimination. In other words, the problem is not just that liberals and conservatives see the world in different ways, but also that this worldview is seen as a direct contradiction of one's own way of life. So, taking the issue of gay marriage as an example, it is not that conservative hostility simply confuses liberals. Rather, liberals interpret gay marriage as an assault on in-group members while conservatives understand those individuals who advocate for gay marriage as out-group members. Thus, acrimony arises not only because of principled differences on public policy, and the anger that it elicits, but acrimony also emerges from each group espousing mutually inconsistent approaches to the appropriate resolution to the enduring problems of group social and political life.

In providing an overview and integration of the work on disgust and its relationship with political orientation, we emphasize the way in which moral judgments differ depending on ideology. Ideology, in turn, informs our understanding of who constitutes a member of the in-group and who remains outside the fold. In what is argued to be the foundational work on disgust with regard to democratic debate, Haidt and Graham (Reference Haidt and Graham2007) show a clear delineation in the type and number of moral dimensions along which people evaluate other individuals, actions, and events. These differences are partly why liberals and conservatives appear to have such difficulty achieving agreement on issues involving moral and cultural judgments in particular; they literally bring different definitions and moral compasses to their evaluation and assessment of the meaning and value of objects, events, and people.

Figure 1, originally presented in Haidt and Graham (Reference Haidt and Graham2007), shows that while liberals tend to focus on two main aspects of morality—those related to harm/care and fairness/reciprocity—conservatives rely on three additional factors to make judgments, in-group/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity, to those which liberals espouse (also see Graham, Haidt, and Nosek Reference Graham, Haidt and Nosek2009). Their work demonstrates, for example, that liberals and conservatives necessarily give different weight to different dimensions, with conservatives evaluating morality along five dimensions and liberals typically evaluating morality only along two dimensions. Specifically, conservatives focus on issues of sanctity and purity, whereas liberals stress the importance of values such as fairness.

Figure 1

Moral Relevance by Domain for Political Ideologues

Figure modified from Haidt and Graham Reference Haidt and Graham2007

Graham, Haidt, and Nosek (Reference Graham, Haidt and Nosek2009) used various methods in four distinct tasks to assess how liberals and conservatives relied on particular values in making moral assessments. The first task examined tradeoffs between the abstract values of violence and loyalty; the second task asked people to evaluate various scenarios; the third explored how people handled the idea of “sacredness”; and the fourth examined reactions to moral and religious texts. Their findings showed that on any given issue, liberals base 50% of their judgments of moral rectitude on assessments of fairness, for example, while for conservatives this value only constitutes 20% of their evaluation. Note that purity and sanctity, while representing an important dimension on which conservatives evaluate moral judgments, remains essentially blind in liberals' judgments. The purity dimension is specifically related to disgust and includes:

This is not to say that purity does not matter to liberals, but rather that such a value is not brought to bear the same way as conservatives do when they evaluate moral rectitude. This particular factor also highlights why understanding disgust sensitivity remains crucial to a comprehensive analysis of the origins of political ideology.

In a series of critical contributions, Inbar, Pizarro, and Bloom (Reference Inbar, Pizarro and Bloom2009) and Inbar et al. (Reference Inbar, Knobe, Pizarro and Bloom2009, Reference Inbar, Pizarro, Iyer and Haidt2011) documented that individuals differ in their sensitivity to disgusting stimuli and that this sensitivity is related to self-reported political conservatism. Disgust sensitivity became particularly activated around precisely those issues that evoked purity and sanctity concerns, such as abortion, homosexuality, and gay marriage (Inbar et al. Reference Inbar, Knobe, Pizarro and Bloom2009). Drawing on Knobe (Reference Knobe2006) who showed that individuals are more likely to ascribe intentionality to someone whose behavior they find morally wrong or offensive, Inbar et al. (Reference Inbar, Knobe, Pizarro and Bloom2009) found that individuals with greater disgust sensitivity were more likely to attribute intentionality to someone whose behavior caused gay men to kiss in public, even if they did not report an aversion to the behavior itself. Note, this attributional bias did not extend to cases involving heterosexuals kissing.Footnote ¹⁰ In what we believe to be the first introduction of disgust into the political science discourse, Smith et al. (Reference Smith, Oxley, Hibbing, Alford and Hibbing2009), in similar fashion to Inbar et al. (Reference Inbar, Knobe, Pizarro and Bloom2009) ran a physiological demonstration of the influence of disgust on politics.

The combined work of Haidt, Rozin, Inbar, and their followers shows that conservatives are truly more sensitive to disgust-related stimuli than are liberals. As a result, conservatives remain more prone to bring these dimensions to bear when making moral judgments because their purity-related concerns activate these sentiments differentially. In this way, people actually rely on different dimensions in making their moral and political judgments of actions, actors, and activities. Disgust becomes intrinsically linked to the expressed and manifest differences we witness along the right-left political spectrum.

In summary, it is not simply that conservatives are more easily disgusted, but rather people with greater disgust sensitivity, showing greater neurological and physiological activation when confronting disgusting stimuli, tend to be more politically conservative. In addition, these individuals also seem to invoke more dimensions when evaluating the morality of various people and events. Alternatively, those who espouse fewer dimensions when assessing morality, typically focused on concerns of fairness and equality, are likely to advocate more liberal proclivities. We believe this point remains critical for democratic debate. To be clear, disgust sensitivity varies across individuals, with some people experiencing a lower threshold at which they find objects disgusting. However, conservatives are more easily disgusted and, in general, appear more prone to integrate disgust into their moral evaluations and, in turn, the political preferences these judgments trigger. In this way, people on opposite sides of the political divide apply different dimensions to morality. These values then inform the positions they take on important issues such as the balance between liberty and defense. This realization provides insight into the intractable nature of many political disagreements because people do not understand that the other side literally experiences, sees, and evaluates the same information in different ways with incommensurate and nonoverlapping dimensions.

DISGUST AND DEMOCRATIC DEBATE

Emotion does influence behavior. Some efforts have sought to explain what specific emotions mean for democracy in more than a polemical sense. Barrington Moore (Reference Moore2000) examined how disgust and fixations on purity affected public discourse, and Julia Kristeva (Reference Kristeva1982) explored how impurity, abjection, and other forms of “othering” can inform our understanding of public policy issues such as immigration.

George Lakoff, in his work on Moral Politics (Reference Lakoff2002), argued that the left-right spectrum could be mapped onto a parental model of nurturance, whereby the mother represented the liberal nurturing approach, and the father offered an exemplar of authority. If Haidt and Graham's (Reference Haidt and Graham2007) argument concerning the foundation of morality proves correct, and additional evidence from subsequent studies have validated their contentions, then it is not that conservatives are more authoritative than liberals (Altemeyer Reference Altemeyer1981), but rather that conservatives approach issues of morality and public policy with a wider set of dimensions on which to evaluate their worth. This approach incorporates concerns about harm and care and fairness and reciprocity just like liberals, but also brings three other dimensions on which they base judgments of morality, that is in-group/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity. Note that these last three dimensions are only those that research has discovered more closely relate to conservative political preferences. This difference in perception appears tied to fundamental evolved physiological sensory mechanisms related to disgust, whether such measures are taken by surveys, observations of facial expression, neurological function, or physiological reactivity.

Politically, the most important connection lies in the recognition that greater disgust sensitivity can provoke greater concerns with purity and in-group loyalty. These associations are not always obvious. For example, people with strong moral conviction actually demonstrate less trust in political authorities, whereas those who espouse greater religiosity demonstrate more trust in those authorities (Wisneski, Lytle, and Skitka Reference Wisneski, Lytle and Skitka2009). The diminished trust in political authority may be the result of conservative emphasis on the more negative role of government in preventing harm rather than promoting welfare. Note that those who displayed greater religiosity and distrust made quicker, less considered decisions. These evaluations stem from different levels of disgust sensitivity and hold huge implications for both the hair trigger factors that instigate political conflict, and also portends poorly for resolving contentious issues that serve the most people in the best way. If liberals and conservatives cannot understand that they bring different currency to the exchange, their intrinsic differences in approach and perspective will be difficult to overcome.

Readers should not infer any moral judgment in this analysis. Viewed from this perspective, conservatives and liberals should be understood as equally moral and empathetic. Conservatives spread out across a wider array of domains in their assessment concerning what constitutes moral action than do liberals. The continuum of morality across political ideology differs in a fundamental way. Liberals appear more confined to two domains of morality while conservatives espouse five. This may partly explain why some liberals painted as “bleeding hearts” appear to manifest greater intensity; they engage fewer domains so they appear to concentrate more energy into those areas. Conservative evaluations, in contrast, are spread out more evenly across all domains, while liberals remain confined primarily to two dimensions on which they evaluate the morality of particular events, people, and positions. Thus, conservatives appear “less caring” precisely because they divide attention across more domains. Liberals do experience these emotions, but they rely on them differently than conservatives do to determine the morality of given individuals or actions.

Liberals and conservatives do converge on dimensions about harm/care and justice/fairness, although they would likely start from a different baseline because liberals would invest a higher percentage of their evaluation in those domains than conservatives. In these areas, achieving consensus should be easier because opposing camps can share overlapping concerns and values. However, on those domains on which conservatives evaluate morality but liberals do not, such as in-group loyalty, authority, and purity, conservatives and liberals would find it more difficult to locate common ground. In those areas, conservatives attach tremendous weight to dimensions in which liberals do not, such as issues related to sexual morality. In short, some things, such as fairness, simply matter more to liberals because they do not evaluate other issues, such as those related to purity, on the same template of moral reasoning as conservatives do. Similarly, some things that matter acutely to conservatives, such as purity, do not affect the moral judgments of liberals. As a result, in allocating a restricted amount of time, energy, and money to given issues, liberals allocate more units to fewer pots, while conservatives put fewer units across more pots.