Reactions To Disgusting Images Predict a Persons Political Ideology

LuxuryYacht writes A new study shows that the way your brain responds to photos of of maggots, mutilated carcasses, and gunk in the kitchen sink gives a pretty good indication of whether you're liberal or conservative. "Remarkably, we found that the brain's response to a single disgusting image was enough to predict an individual's political ideology," Read Montague, a Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute psychology professor who led the study, said in a written statement. 83 men and women viewed a series of images while having their brains scanned in a functional MRI (fMRI) machine. The images included the disgusting photos described above, along with photos of babies and pleasant landscapes. Afterward, the participants were asked to rate how grossed out they were by each photo. They also completed a survey about their political beliefs, which included questions about their attitudes toward school prayer, gun control, immigration, and gay marriage. There was no significant difference in how liberals and conservatives rated the photos. But the researchers noted differences between the two groups in the activity of brain regions associated with disgust recognition, emotion regulation, attention and even memory. The differences were so pronounced that the researchers could analyze a scan and predict the person's political leaning with 95 percent accuracy.

Comments

Two things.

[khasim]

First:

Eighty-three healthy individuals (males/females = 41/42; age = 18â"62; mean [SD] = 29.0 [11.3] years) in Roanoke and Blacksburg, VA, area were recruited ...

Second:

They also completed a survey about their political beliefs, which included questions about their attitudes toward school prayer, gun control, immigration, and gay marriage.

So what would the results be if the recruits were from a more "Liberal" country?

That is the problem with these "studies". DO NOT look in your backyard for cases that support your bias. Look for cases that contradict your bias. Even if you have to look at the people in other countries. Particularly countries where there is less focus on the items that are controversial in the USofA.

Re:Two things.

[Chrisje]

And boy let me tell you, the items that are controversial in the USofA are not the same ones that are controversial over here in Europe. Of course we get a smattering of IS and Ebola related news this time of year, but in general political discourse tends to not involve discussions on what one should be doing with one's penis, vagina, uterus or the contents thereof, but much more about the re-distribution of wealth and the state of law.

I see that both in Israel and the US, to be honest: A focus on the irrelevant. Case in point being that the security craze and hype surrounding 9/11 has caused a spike in ground traffic that killed more people than the 9/11 incident itself. It seems to me that both the US and Israel have a greater tendency than normal to hype relatively small risk factors and completely and blatantly ignore evidence for large looming risk factors, even in the face of mounting evidence.

The more progressive a society gets, the more balanced people's view is on risk. Whether the one causes the other or vice versa, I do not know. The Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland are decidedly more earthy in their political discourse, even if obviously we do have some fear mongering rotten apples. Case in point in the Netherlands being the fascist reactionaries that crawled from under all the rocks in the country in the wake of the discussion on whether blackface is a good idea, but I digress.

So while the findings are interesting, firstly 83 subjects is a piss in the pond and secondly the original poster is right: Is this finding universal for all the cultures we find on the globe?

Lastly, by US standards I would be a flaming liberal. There's nothing wrong with smoking a doozie, I am atheist, I think abortion isn't even worth a discussion since babies only really become sentient some 2 months after birth, obviously I am in favour of gay marriage and last but not least I think the proliferation of weapons amongst civilians (and even the army, but I digress again) is a really really silly idea.

However, I self identify as a Left Winger in terms of economic re-distribution politics, as a Constitutional Conservative when it comes to safeguarding the state of law in my country, a Conservationist in terms of the environment and indeed finally as a Liberal in terms of sexual practice and tolerance and the tolerance for people of other color. But when it comes to my atheism I am quite extremist. I think people who are god-believers are simply lesser beings and I do strive to stamp out god-belief and related silliness wherever I encounter it.

Now I wonder, given all my views and thoughts on things, whether I would be deemed a "Conservative" or "Liberal", and what selection criteria would be used for classifying me such. Because none of those were mentioned in the article.

Re:Two things.

[Prune]

The following quote from the paper suggests that, contrary to your claim, there is a natural basis for defining what is a moderate position:

Political attitudes and interest did not show a significant linear relationship [r(81)= 0.148, p= 0.182], but instead showed a U-shaped curve (FigureS1A), indicating that greater political interest is associated with polarized political attitudes.

The actual figure shows there is a fairly even distribution in terms of frequency throughout the range of political attitudes (you can see it by eye even if you don't create a histogram of the data), but the centrality of the lowest interest section along the attitudes axis needs to be explained. If you were to be correct, the range of attitudes on that axis covered by samples (removing outliers, if any), would be significantly shifted based on which country the sample group is taken from. Then either the location of the lowest interest section would not be central in the sample range for some countries (and, from experience spending time in a dozen different countries, I would bet my life against that--polarization is evident and ubiquitous), or the lowest interest section would be shifted along the attitudes axis, preserving its relative centrality for each country's data set. The latter requires a mechanism to generate it, and I'm extremely skeptical as to your ability to propose a convincing one that is based on primarily sociological considerations (biological ones are out of the question due to the relative biological uniformity across many countries with seemingly different political leanings according to your perception). I expect neither to be the case--that you are mistaken, and plots of sample groups from different nations will have far more overlap on the attitudes axis than you perceive. The range of fundamental political attitudes does not vary greatly from country to country and, as this paper implies, likely has a strong biological basis; rather, small differences are magnified by complex sociocultural mechanisms to create the biases of the overarching political landscape in each country.

Re:Linear political ideology?

[itzly]

With a two party system, everything becomes a linear scale.

Re:Immigration is not the problem.

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Go to a mosque and talk to a muslim. You might learn something.

I rather wouldn't. It might be disturbing.

I'm sorry, but the more we learn, the more we have to accept that being religious in most forms is simply being delusional in the truest sense of the word.

Re:Truly disgusting pictures

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Or perhaps some of us simply value mind over matter. The precursor to a human being is a lump of molecules, then a lump of cells, then a very juvenile vertebrate individual with zero consciousness. At some point, it becomes a human being as we know it where virtually everyone thinks it's wrong. Some people would apparently like me to think that disposing of a zygote is murder. In that case, well, you'd have to put Mother Nature on trial. It's she who sacrifices about one zygote for each two live newborns. The problem is that there's no fixed boundary. And since you're applying a binary classifier on this problem, and people are different, almost by definition, there will always be regions when someone thinks it's right and someone else will think it's wrong. Ever for the zygote, there will be people who will always think it's wrong. I'm sorry, but this whole issue seems like a manufactured problem. There's no solution to this in the same sense that there's a solution to "do alien civilizations exist?" or "does P=NP?". It's simply an issue of a completely different class. To be honest, I find it puzzling that people even argue about it as if trying to convince anyone about one's own opinion - which is what you seem to be doing - made somehow sense. I don't think it does.

Re:are conservatives just showing more reaction?

[TarPitt]

It seems very reasonable to blame those with the greatest share for wealth and power for the current state of society, rather than the impoverished and marginalized.

Though the latter position has a long heritage, stating back to the days when isolated, quirky old women were burned for being witches, somehow causing famine and pestilence despite their poverty and lack of influence.

Re:Concrete proof at last

[tepples]

How is it a "bad life choice", say, to be born with cerebral palsy or to develop type 1 diabetes mellitus?