Pathogens & Politics
There’s been a bunch of papers recently looking at the relationship between political views and disgust. Much of this work has been animated by an idea referred to as the “behavioral immune system.” The general notion is that you reduce your risk of getting infected by pathogens by taking appropriate action when there’s a good chance pathogens are around. You smell some poop, you experience disgust, you move away from the poop. Like that.
The idea has recently been extended to more abstract domains. Suppose for some reason that you are particularly vulnerable to infection by pathogens. Because, the argument goes, people from other groups have pathogens to which you have not been exposed – and you are therefore more likely to be susceptible – you acquire attitudes that motivate appropriate behavior. You become more ethnocentric, xenophobic – perhaps conservative, in the American political sense – and that sort of thing. This idea carries the implication that maybe some pretty abstract political views, such as those associated with ethnocentrism that are driven by mechanisms designed to minimize pathogen threats.
A new paper just published in Evolutionary Psychology explores this idea. (See the paper’s reference section for citations for articles relevant to these ideas.) Joshua Tybur and colleagues investigated this by conducting a series of studies in which they looked at the relationships among a number of variables. They reasoned that if political views are driven by concerns about pathogens, then they ought to find that people who are more conservative will also be higher on a scale that measures ones sensitivity to pathogen disgust. They also included two other sorts of disgust, sexual and moral. Briefly, do the people who report being really grossed out by stepping on dog poop tend to be the same people that call themselves politically conservative?
Briefly, no. In contrast to what one might have expected from the theory, across three studies, they find no such relationship. Of the three types of disgust measured, only sexual disgust related to conservatism.
There are a couple of things I particularly like about this work. First, I like any paper that reports null results. I mean, they do have some significant results as well, but the primary message is that they didn’t find the relationship in question. I sort of think people tend to be shy about reporting null results, which I don’t think they should. In addition, while I’m sympathetic that selection pressures associated with pathogens can drive all sorts of interesting adaptations – this book is excellent – my guess is that political ideology is doing something else, not related to pathogens. (Also, these findings resonate with some of my own, which I find reassuring.)
Anyway, I think this paper is likely to stir this particular pot, and I’ll be interested to see what happens next.