• DOI:10.1080/02699930802110007
• Corpus ID: 7411404

Conservatives are more easily disgusted than liberals

@article{Inbar2009ConservativesAM,
  title={Conservatives are more easily disgusted than liberals},
  author={Yoel Inbar and David A Pizarro and Paul Bloom},
  journal={Cognition and Emotion},
  year={2009},
  volume={23},
  pages={714 - 725}
}

• Y. Inbar, David A Pizarro, P. Bloom
• Published 13 May 2009
• Psychology
• Cognition and Emotion

The uniquely human emotion of disgust is intimately connected to morality in many, perhaps all, cultures (Rozin, Lowery, Imada, & Haidt, 1999b). We report two studies suggesting that a predisposition to feel disgust (“disgust sensitivity”) is associated with more conservative political attitudes, especially for issues related to the moral dimension of purity. In the first study, we document a positive correlation between disgust sensitivity and self-reported conservatism in a broad sample of US adults. In Study 2 we show that while disgust sensitivity is associated with more conservative attitudes on a range of political issues, this relationship is strongest for purity-related issues—specifically, abortion and gay marriage.