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Understanding Disgust

Listening to the NY Times podcast on disgust got me curious about the topic and lead me to this essay. The fact that what disgusts us can predict our political leanings with 95% accuracy was fascinating:

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. 

I know about an equal number of liberals and conservatives and to think they would be disgusted by completely different things was not something I would have expected. But the idea that being most disgust prone in general skews conservative seems logical at first blush:

Using a far cruder tool for measuring sensitivity to disgust—basically a standardized questionnaire that asks subjects how they would feel about, say, touching a toilet seat in a public restroom or seeing maggots crawling on a piece of meat—numerous studies have found that high levels of sensitivity to disgust tend to go hand in hand with a “conservative ethos.”

In each of these examples, the test is about what you find tolerable and part of the natural order of the world and therefore acceptable. It also made me think of kids and what they find gross - some are more easily grossed out than others when they are young, over time that pattern may change and fewer things produce a severe response. Following this logic, does that mean their political inclinations changed too. 

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