A new poll shows 82% of Alabama voters are aware of the sexual misconduct allegations against Alabama senatorial candidate Roy Moore. I’d like to see a poll showing how many are aware of the Gates and Manafort indictments. I’d be willing to bet, if there were such a poll, the number would not be that high.
T___p made racist comments about Mexicans, disrespected a prisoner of war, made fun of a reporter with a disability, and feuded with a gold star family and he got away with it. But a tape came out of him talking about grabbing women’s private parts and that was nearly the end. It might have been the end if not for the timely (one hour later) dump of the Podesta emails.
Republicans were way more upset by Bill Clinton’s tawdry adulterous relationship with an intern than Richard Nixon’s flouting of the Constitution.
There’s got to be a reason for Republicans’ seemingly perverse moral assessments and just saying that they are stupid and hypocritical is not a satisfactory answer for me.
It has always seemed to me a truism that conservatives are more concerned with the sins of the body (especially lust) while liberals are more concerned with sins of the mind (like greed).
The obsession of conservatives with homosexuality, with trans-people going to the bathroom, women who have illicit sex “getting away it” by having abortions (Yes, they have high-minded reasons, too, but punishing women for having sex is down there in the unconscious and every now and then they slip up and give it away) demonstrates how, for them, morality is all about sexual behavior and nothing else.
So some social scientists were also interested in this phenomenon. The research is not new; it’s a few years old. The allegations against Roy Moore, and the reactions to it, along with the resurfacing of interest in the pee-pee tape has got me thinking about it again.
Liberal or conservative? Reactions to disgust are a dead giveaway
P. Read Montague of Virginia Tech and his colleagues looked at fMRI responses as subjects were shown disgusting, pleasant, and neutral images and compared them to scores on a standardized test measuring political leanings.
And what they found was this:
Disgusting images, and the mutilated body of an animal especially, generated neural responses that were highly predictive of political orientation. That was true even though the neural predictors didn't necessarily agree with participants' conscious rating of those disturbing pictures.
A single disgusting image was sufficient to predict each subject's political orientation," he says. "I haven't seen such clean predictive results in any other functional imaging experiments in our lab or others
Another such study was one conducted by Kevin B. Smith, political science professor at the University of Nebraska.
The things that consistently arouse disgust are also things that make us sick, such as excrement and corpses, which are sources of life-threatening bacteria and viruses. So it is believed that the disgust response helps us avoid contaminated items that could give us a disease and, in evolutionary terms, reduce our chances of survival and reproduction. Because of its role in survival as well as the particularly old region of the brain (anterior insula) that is most active when people experience disgust, it is often described as one of the original emotions and thought of as a building block for other emotions.
And, I suppose, in some, the reaction of disgust extends to all bodily functions. It has to do with purity.
So what's the political connection? Evidence suggests that harm avoidance and the need for fairness underlie people's moral judgments in a number of cultures. While liberals rely primarily on these two values, conservatives also rely on desires for group loyalty, authoritative structure, and, most importantly here, purity. Following this logic, Kevin and other researchers became interested in the potential for a relation between disgust and political orientations. They speculated that conservatives are more disgust sensitive than liberals as a result of their concern with purity-related norms and that this difference would manifest itself on issues that some may associate with sexual purity (e.g., homosexual sex and, therefore, gay rights).
What all this suggests to me is that conservatives must surely be reaching a critical mass of cognitive dissonance as they are forced to accept more and more impure behavior in order to preserve their group loyalty. I think a pee-pee tape might cause them to explode. I really hope there is a pee-pee tape.
Here’s a quiz you can take to see if you are liberal or conservative.
Just bear in mind that, in the Virginia Tech study, the neural predictors which correlated with political orientation didn't necessarily agree with participants' conscious ratings.