Liberals and Conservatives React in Wildly Different Ways to Repulsive Pictures

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: February 7, 2019 at 2:49:55 AM GMT+9
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Liberals and Conservatives React in Wildly Different Ways to Repulsive Pictures
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> [Note:  This item comes from friend David Rosenthal.  DLH]
>
> Liberals and Conservatives React in Wildly Different Ways to Repulsive Pictures
> To a surprising degree, our political beliefs may derive from a specific aspect of our biological makeup: our 
> propensity to feel physical revulsion.
> By  KATHLEEN MCAULIFFE
> Mar 2019 Issue
> <https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/03/the-yuck-factor/580465/>
>
> I. “My Jaw Dropped”
>
> Why do we have the political opinions we have? Why do we embrace one outlook toward the world and not another? How 
> and why do our stances change? The answers to questions such as these are of course complex. Most people aren’t 
> reading policy memos to inform every decision. Differences of opinion are shaped by contrasting life experiences: 
> where you live; how you were raised; whether you’re rich or poor, young or old. Emotion comes into the picture, and 
> emotion has a biological basis, at least in part. All of this and more combines into a stew without a fixed recipe, 
> even if many of the ingredients are known.
>
> On rare occasions, we learn of a new one—a key factor that seems to have been overlooked. To a surprising degree, a 
> recent strand of experimental psychology suggests, our political beliefs may have something to do with a specific 
> aspect of our biological makeup: our propensity to feel physical disgust.
>
> In the mid-2000s, a political scientist approached the neuroscientist Read Montague with a radical proposal. He and 
> his colleagues had evidence, he said, that political orientation might be partly inherited, and might be revealed by 
> our physiological reactivity to threats. To test their theory, they wanted Montague, who heads the Human Neuroimaging 
> Laboratory at Virginia Tech, to scan the brains of subjects as they looked at a variety of images—including ones 
> displaying potential contaminants such as mutilated animals, filthy toilets, and faces covered with sores—to see 
> whether neural responses showed any correlation with political ideology. Was he interested?
>
> Montague initially laughed at the idea—for one thing, MRI research requires considerable time and resources—but the 
> team returned with studies to argue their case, and eventually he signed on. When the data began rolling in, any 
> skepticism about the project quickly dissolved. The subjects, 83 in total, were first shown a randomized mixture of 
> neutral and emotionally evocative pictures—this second category contained both positive and negative images—while 
> undergoing brain scans. Then they filled out a questionnaire seeking their views on hot-button political and social 
> issues, in order to classify their general outlook on a spectrum from extremely liberal to extremely conservative. As 
> Montague mapped the neuroimaging data against ideology, he recalls, “my jaw dropped.” The brains of liberals and 
> conservatives reacted in wildly different ways to repulsive pictures: Both groups reacted, but different brain 
> networks were stimulated. Just by looking at the subjects’ neural responses, in fact, Montague could predict with 
> more than 95 percent accuracy whether they were liberal or conservative.
>
> The subjects in the trial were also shown violent imagery (men pointing revolvers directly at the camera, battle 
> scenes, car wrecks) and pleasant pictures (smiling babies, beautiful sunsets, cute bunnies). But it was only the 
> reaction to repulsive things that correlated with ideology. “I was completely flabbergasted by the predictability of 
> the results,” Montague says.
>
> His collaborators—John Hibbing and Kevin Smith at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, and John Alford at Rice 
> University, in Houston—were just as surprised, though less by the broad conclusion than by the specificity of the 
> findings and the startling degree of predictability. Their own earlier research had already yielded a suggestive 
> finding, indicating that conservatives tend to have more pronounced bodily responses than liberals when shown 
> stomach-churning imagery. However, the investigators had expected that brain reactions to violent imagery would also 
> be predictive of ideology. Compared with liberals, they’d previously found, conservatives generally pay more 
> attention—and react more strongly—to a broad array of threats. For example, they have a more pronounced startle 
> response to loud noises, and they gaze longer at photos of people displaying angry expressions. And yet even in this 
> research, Hibbing says, “we almost always get clearer results with stimuli that are disgusting than with those that 
> suggest a threat from humans, animals, or violent events. We have an ongoing discussion in our lab about whether this 
> is because disgust is simply a more powerful and more politically relevant emotion or because it is an emotion that 
> is easier to evoke with still images in a lab setting.”
>
> Findings so dramatic, especially in the social sciences, should be viewed with caution until replicated. The axiom 
> that extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof clearly applies here. That said, Hibbing, Montague, and their 
> colleagues are scarcely alone in linking disgust and ideology.
>
> [snip]
>
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