Conservative disgust > liberal disgust
November 5, 2014 7:02 AM   Subscribe

"The researchers found that conservatives tend to react more strongly to disgusting images having increased activity in regions of their brain that are involved in processing disgust and regulating emotion. The liberals, on the other hand, had increased activity in different brain regions." Study
posted by ChuckRamone (52 comments total) 14 users marked this as a favorite
 
I'm feeling a lot of liberal disgust right now.
posted by vibrotronica at 7:05 AM on November 5, 2014 [28 favorites]


No kidding... the timing on this article is a little... opportune? ;^)
posted by surazal at 7:09 AM on November 5, 2014 [1 favorite]


I've always suspected that the thought "ewwwww" is always going around in a conservative's head and this study kinda confirms that.
posted by ChuckRamone at 7:15 AM on November 5, 2014 [11 favorites]


All this proves is that conservatives react more strongly to disgusting images, without addressing the obvious "chicken and egg" issue.

I think the only way to measure whether this reaction is cause or effect is to show these disgusting images to children, and subsequently track whether they grow up to be liberal or conservative. In order to minimize the effect of environment (which may also influence one's politics), it is important that they show the disgusting images to very young children.
posted by Mayor Curley at 7:20 AM on November 5, 2014 [7 favorites]


In order to minimize the effect of environment (which may also influence one's politics), it is important that they show the disgusting images to very young children.

That would be one hell of a research grant proposal.
posted by mcmile at 7:23 AM on November 5, 2014 [4 favorites]


Perhaps they could use "Interesting Ball" in their testing.
posted by sutt at 7:23 AM on November 5, 2014


MetaFilter: it is important that they show the disgusting images to very young children.
posted by Tanizaki at 7:25 AM on November 5, 2014 [12 favorites]


it is important that they show the disgusting images to very young children.

Howwwwwdy-ho!
posted by rory at 7:26 AM on November 5, 2014 [7 favorites]


Any theory that purports to explain politics with brain scans must also explain Dennis Miller.
posted by condour75 at 7:27 AM on November 5, 2014 [6 favorites]


I'm reminded of a previous study linked (I think) on the blue which outlined differences along American political lines with respect to ideas of 'purity.' The specific example that stuck with me was a Yes/No question about preservation of national parks, which question was phrased as either "we should preserve our national parks for future generations" or "we should safeguard the purity of our national parks." Among conservative respondents, the former phrasing led to No's but the latter flipped it almost entirely with Yes's. Liberals were about the same in either case, iirc.

It was super interesting and became one of those tiny explanation tools I carry around in the back of my head.

I tried to google it up just now, but the closest I came was this Washington Times article from 2009, which seems to be about one of the "earlier studies" mentioned in OP:
It poses all sorts of uncomfortable possibilities to participants — gauging their reactions on a scale of 1-5 to vomit, graveyards, preserved body parts, squashed earthworms and monkey meat.

The researchers surveyed the degree of ideological beliefs of the same test group, to reveal “a correlation between being more easily disgusted and political conservatism,” the study said.
Not that it's a rubric for all political stances, at least per that 2009 article:
In another study, the researchers offered the disgust scale to 91 Cornell undergraduates, also asking them where they stood on gay marriage, abortion, gun control, labor unions, tax cuts and affirmative action.

“Participants who rated higher in disgust sensitivity were more likely to oppose gay marriage and abortion, issues that are related to notions of morality or purity,” the study found. Squeamish people were also more likely to disapprove of gays and lesbians in general.
No mention there of unions or tax cuts.
posted by postcommunism at 7:32 AM on November 5, 2014 [8 favorites]


That's a hell of an author list. A bunch of researchers, some of them at the absolute top of their field, from 6 different, well-respected institutions pooled their collective brain power and came up with "We're gonna show some people some nasty pictures and ask 'em who they like to vote for."
posted by logicpunk at 7:36 AM on November 5, 2014 [5 favorites]


Huh. that's pretty interesting. My friend with reactionary tendencies has a very weak stomach and will gag at even the memory of something disgusting.
posted by Mei's lost sandal at 7:42 AM on November 5, 2014 [1 favorite]


It seems to me that many conservative viewpoints are highly informed by emotion, particularly fear and disgust, so this isn't surprising. I would be very interested to know how and when differences between liberals and conservatives appear. I know from experience that at a very young age pretty much all kids are fascinated by insects and spiders, and there seems to be a whole segment of kids entertainment and toys related to grossness (garbage pail kids, greasy grimy gopher guts song, etc.) so I would assume the differences are a product of the environment.
posted by snofoam at 7:50 AM on November 5, 2014


I suspect the amount of liberal disgust would be different if the disgusting images were pictures of things like a box of processed food or their parents' religion.
posted by Tanizaki at 7:51 AM on November 5, 2014 [23 favorites]


The most fun aspect of this is that, whichever side of the political divide you're on, you can interpret it as evidence that your opponents are provably brain damaged. Probably with no sense of irony, because everyone believes that their particular bias is obviously correct, duh.

They sort of address this in the paper:
People tend to think that their political views are purely cognitive (i.e., rational). However, our results further support the notion that emotional processes are tightly coupled to complex and high-dimensional human belief systems [13], and such emotional processes might play a much larger role than we currently believe, possibly outside our awareness of its influence.
[...]
Despite growing evidence from various fields, including genetics, cognitive neuroscience, and psychology, many political scientists remain skeptical of research connecting biological factors with political ideology, arguing variously that biology is irrelevant to central political questions [30], that the theoretical basis for expecting biology to be relevant is weak and murky [31], that acknowledging a role for biology is reductionist [32], and that recognizing the relevance of biology to human beliefs and behaviors is potentially dangerous [33].
Exploring the biology underlying behaviour is always tricky territory, because there are fascinating questions to be asked about what makes us tick as humans: are people really born straight, or cis, or violent, or smart? For those and a thousand other things, how much is nature vs nurture? For the aspects that are inborn somehow, what can studying those structures tell us about how our minds -- and therefore how we -- work?

The trouble is, every time these questions come up they're leapt on by complete assholes who want to justify anything from lazy bigotry to genocide (misapplication of evolutionary psychology, eugenics, etc). This combines with the fact that most of us like to think of ourselves as rational and unswayed by base emotion and biology, and therefore find the whole thing a bit insulting, so discussion becomes basically impossible.
posted by metaBugs at 7:53 AM on November 5, 2014 [6 favorites]


Oh, as a side note: they don't seem to have published the images (they're from a standardised set, which they presumably want to keep secret so they're a surprise to new study participants), but you can see brief descriptions of them on page 25 of the Supplementary Data [PDF]. In the pages after that, you can also the political questionnaire and a written questionnaire along the lines "how much does [specific disgusting thing] bother you?". It's an interesting read.
posted by metaBugs at 7:58 AM on November 5, 2014


Along these lines, Scott Alexander wrote:
free tip for liberal political activists – offering to tidy up voting booths before the election is probably a thousand times more effective than anything you’re doing right now. I will leave the free tip for conservative political activists to your imagination
Some of the rest of the post talks about how responses to Ebola and ISIS fit into existing conservative and liberal narratives.
posted by Jasper Fnorde at 8:06 AM on November 5, 2014 [5 favorites]


I want to know more about the people who answered Disagree to: 12. I would rather eat a piece of fruit than a piece of paper.
posted by sparklemotion at 8:10 AM on November 5, 2014 [5 favorites]


I don't know if this work has any validity, because I'm not convinced that their theory about political orientation is remotely accurate. They constructed an additive scale of political character, which assumes that "liberal" and "conservative" are two objectively real and opposite positions. Here's the most expansive measure they used to determine where someone fell on the spectrum they constructed:

Here is a list of various topics. Please indicate how you feel about each topic.
1. strongly agree
2. agree
3. uncertain
4. disagree
5. strongly disagree

a. School prayer
b. Pacifism
c. Stop immigration
d. Death penalty
e. Government-arranged healthcare
f. Premarital sex
g. Gay marriage
h. Abortion rights
i. Evolution
j. Biblical truth
k. Increase welfare spending
l. Protect gun rights
m. Increase military spending
n. Government regulation of business
o. Small government
p. Foreign aide
q. Lower taxes
r. Stem cell research
s. Abstinence-only sex education
t. Allow torture of terrorism suspects


One of the problems here is that these issues are already highly partisan, and by design. So they may not be measuring something intrinsic about the person, but rather may be once again measuring partisan affiliation.

They're also using a conception of conservatism which was delineated in 1968, when that term assuredly had different policy implications, from this source:

A new measure of conservatism.
Wilson, G.D. and Patterson, J.R.
Br. J. Soc. Clin. Psychol. 1968; 7: 264–269


So on a fundamental level, I just don't see any reason to assume that their model of political identity has any real validity. It seems arbitrary and very tendentious. Additionally, it's possible that the ordering of the events in the experiment influenced the outcome -- they should have also tried gauging political orientation first with a separate group to see if they got the same results.
posted by clockzero at 8:11 AM on November 5, 2014


I find the claim that conservatives have brains to be highly dubious.

(Zing!)

Seriously, though, this experiment is tainted by the authors' own bias, since they're the ones who decided what was "disgusting" in the first place. Surely, by definition, disgusting is as disgusting does.
posted by Sys Rq at 8:17 AM on November 5, 2014


I want to know more about the people who answered Disagree to: 12. I would rather eat a piece of fruit than a piece of paper.

They're the reliable base for the Pica Party.

You do not want to know about their GOTV efforts.
posted by Kadin2048 at 8:18 AM on November 5, 2014 [10 favorites]


but rather may be once again measuring partisan affiliation.

which evidence has shown is remarkably stable over time.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 8:24 AM on November 5, 2014


> It seems to me that many conservative viewpoints are highly informed by emotion

I don't think it's fair to single out conservative viewpoints (I see on preview that metaBugs pasted the relevant section of the study).

However, I'd love to know what images do provoke similar reactions in liberals. Or if any do at all. Given that liberal and conservative participants apparently rated the images similarly it's difficult to imagine what would make my brain register disgust in a way that a conservative would not. Almost everything I can come up with is politically charged or has class connotations, but there was that recent thread about nature vandalism. My reaction was immediate and visceral -- I almost posted at the time that it was as close as I get to how some people seem to feel about social programs or abortion rights. Although I dunno if that reaction was traditionally liberal, traditionally conservative, or just out and out tribal -- or if it was really disgust.

> So on a fundamental level, I just don't see any reason to assume that their model of political identity has any real validity.

Being able to predict someone's political stance with 95% certainty based on their reaction to a dirty toilet seems pretty significant. But I do wonder if maybe liberals in this case just have a wider range of experience or tolerance, and once you hit the limit of that range they'll vote in just as reactionary way. In other words, if disgust as it's measured and correlated in the study is a range or scale, not an either/or.

Otherwise liberal folks exhibiting transphobic opinions or beliefs, for example.

Still, the images tested sound pretty darn neutral, which makes it seem like you're either Team Disgust or you're not.
posted by postcommunism at 8:29 AM on November 5, 2014


They're the reliable base for the Pica Party.

You do not want to know about their GOTV efforts.


I got one of their leaflets. It was delicious.
posted by Strange Interlude at 8:30 AM on November 5, 2014 [8 favorites]


People who spend more time on the Internet are less affected by shocking or disgusting images and also skew liberal, so it makes sense.
posted by michaelh at 8:32 AM on November 5, 2014 [3 favorites]


It seems to me that many conservative viewpoints are highly informed by emotion

I offer any Metafilter thread ever as evidence that this is not mainly a conservative tendency.
posted by echocollate at 8:34 AM on November 5, 2014 [8 favorites]


The most fun aspect of this is that, whichever side of the political divide you're on, you can interpret it as evidence that your opponents are provably brain damaged.

I heard this study being discussed on a right wing talk station a few days ago and their take on it was "this proves that those liberals are a bunch of wusses". I'd already heard about the study and wondered if they had some kind of reading comprehension problem or if they were deliberately being disingenuous.

People who spend more time on the Internet are less affected by shocking or disgusting images and also skew liberal, so it makes sense.

So, should the Dems start courting the 4chan vote?
posted by fuse theorem at 8:39 AM on November 5, 2014 [1 favorite]


I heard this study being discussed on a right wing talk station a few days ago and their take on it was "this proves that those liberals are a bunch of wusses". I'd already heard about the study and wondered if they had some kind of reading comprehension problem or if they were deliberately being disingenuous. .

Yeah, if anything it proves that we're some combination of naïve, amoral, and constitutively incapable of perceiving a real threat when it's in front of us. Amusingly, one of the references from this paper leads to a study claiming that people who're more prone to being physically startled (loud bangs, sudden movements, etc) are more likely to test as conservative on whatever scale they were using. This is either because conservatives are cowardly knee-jerkers and liberals much more reasoned in their responses, or because conservatives are vigilant and proactive, while liberals are dull-witted and indolent. It's hard to tell.

On a slightly more serious note, it raises fascinating questions about the use of graphic imagery on anti-abortion posters. Does this imply that the two sides' experience of seeing those signs is much more different than we'd previously thought, helping to explain some of the disconnect between people who don't understand why they would/wouldn't be expected to work on Any Reasonable PersonTM?
posted by metaBugs at 8:54 AM on November 5, 2014 [2 favorites]


Another curious, interesting attempt to single out what makes for a conservative and what a liberal. Ignores: those who change as they age. Those who begin to make a lot of money . There are conservatives who focus upon social issues and others who are fairly liberal in views of social issues but care a good deal about economic issues. Race, gendeer are also a part of the overall subject
posted by Postroad at 9:03 AM on November 5, 2014 [1 favorite]


> On a slightly more serious note, it raises fascinating questions about the use of graphic imagery on anti-abortion posters. Does this imply that the two sides' experience of seeing those signs is much more different than we'd previously thought[?]

That's a good one.

Person A (low disgust reaction) objects to a graphic anti-abortion poster held by Person B (high disgust reaction). Person A says that the poster is gross and unnecessary. Person B hears "I'm going to cop out and refuse to engage your argument," because to Person B the grossness of the poster is the argument -- and it's a convincing one. From Person B's perspective, feeling disgust at the poster is a moral reaction, and a refusal to acknowledge that and react accordingly is hypocritical.

Person A, however, might say the exact same thing about graphic depictions of drunk driving accidents. They literally mean "I don't want to see that," not "I feel moral disgust that does not jibe with my actions and it makes me uncomfortable."
posted by postcommunism at 9:22 AM on November 5, 2014 [1 favorite]


condour75: Any theory that purports to explain politics with brain scans must also explain Dennis Miller.
Cute, I get the joke, but let's not ever kid ourselves: There is no IQ ceiling on conservatives.

Just like there is no IQ ceiling on sociopaths.

Just like.
posted by IAmBroom at 9:30 AM on November 5, 2014 [3 favorites]


Graphic anti-abortion propaganda grabbed me in particular because I had previously understood it as just shock tactics in service of an argument: "look at the unacknowledged ramifications of your actions!" Like videos of factory farming or sweatshops.

In the context of OP though, it shifts from shock tactics to: "I find disgust morally convincing; so will others." It's not being deployed in the service of an argument such as "life begins at conception" or etc.; it is the argument, and other tactics are deployed in service of it.

(simplifying)
posted by postcommunism at 9:33 AM on November 5, 2014 [8 favorites]


IamBroom: Joking aside, I didn't really mean that it has to explain Dennis Miller because of his IQ (or, as proxy, ability to rattle off middlebrow cultural references). Just that it has to explain the mutability of political beliefs. (Dennis Miller being a poster child for sudden post-911 right wing conversion)

I guess I'd just love to see an Oliver Sacks-style case study of a person who suffered brain damage in the disgust area, and whose political views did a 180.
posted by condour75 at 10:31 AM on November 5, 2014 [1 favorite]


Football: the newest partisan divide
posted by bukvich at 10:34 AM on November 5, 2014


They're such delicate little flowers.
posted by lumpenprole at 11:06 AM on November 5, 2014 [1 favorite]


The name I'm obligated to mention here is Jonathan Haidt.



He gave three TED talks: And he also wrote a book, The Righteous Mind, which goes into not only disgust (the sanctity axis), but also the other 5 axes of Moral Foundations Theory and why we as human beings believe certain things are right, wrong, disgusting, etc.

He's been blue before. The book/talks are highly recommended if you want to have a serious think about this sort of thing. I'm a bit surprised his name wasn't anywhere in the paper.
posted by Make Way for Ducklings! at 11:26 AM on November 5, 2014 [4 favorites]


I find the claim that conservatives have brains to be highly dubious.

let's not do that.

I'd love to know what images do provoke similar reactions in liberals. Or if any do at all. Given that liberal and conservative participants apparently rated the images similarly it's difficult to imagine what would make my brain register disgust in a way that a conservative would not.

Hmm, I had a different read on it entirely - that it wasn't a matter of "convservatives reacted to these things with disgust but liberals reacted to other things with disgust", but more like, "we showed the same pictures to everyone and the conservatives got wigged out by the icky stuff but the liberals were all 'meh'."

And I was chalking that up to liberals just having had more exposure to some of the particular ills of the world - i.e., you can't wig me out by showing me a picture of a person suffering from a famine because I'm already very cognizant that that's a thing happening in the world, whereas someone who isn't exposed to that issue would see a picture of a famine victim and be all shocked.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 11:40 AM on November 5, 2014 [1 favorite]


So, should the Dems start courting the 4chan vote?

Depends on the board. /pol/, /k/, and /v/ are pretty much out of reach, but they might have decent luck with /a/, /fa/, /lgbt/, and /tg/. /b/ is mostly not old enough to vote, and /int/ mostly aren't citizens. /jp/, /mlp/, /d/, /h/, and /r9k/ would each be political kryptonite in their own ways.

Come down hard enough on the core cryptoanarchist talking points (anti-DMCA, anti-NSA, anti-CALEA, anti-TPP, pro-Net Neutrality, etc.) and the less disorderly parts of 4ch would be attainable. Real risk of pissing off AIPAC, the MPAA, the RIAA, etc. in the process, though.
posted by fifthrider at 11:58 AM on November 5, 2014 [1 favorite]


This is fascinating and potentially very helpful for communication between people and groups with different political approaches.

So much reactionary speech seems couched in terms of disgust, and so much opposing speech doesn't address that feeling at all.
posted by amtho at 12:15 PM on November 5, 2014


83 people.

Out of 316.1 million people - just in the US.

Out of 7.125 billion people in the whole world.

83 people.

I really don't understand how this is supposed to be significant. I know there's the comforting notion of - "There's *two* kinds of people in the world" - but this "study" is hardly a justification.
posted by jammy at 1:22 PM on November 5, 2014


I have to admit, I'm baffled by this. I have a very strong disgust response and I'm about as progressive as they come; I wonder if some of it is about desensitization. I avoid horror movies and graphic images, and always have, so I'm very sensitive to seeing them. I also avoid watching or re-watching traumatic things. I wonder how many conservatives live in similar bubbles, only theirs is based off of cultural mandates instead of idiosyncratic sensitivities - e.g. they avoid the R rated movies because they're ungodly; I avoid them because murdersex is icky - both of us are more sensitive to the images overall.

Their subject sample is also very small, and very locationally bound, which implies further confounds from the population itself might be in play. The results are extremely high for a subject group of 85 people, though!

And hopefully this goes without saying that this is quasi-experimental since people can't be randomly assigned conservative or liberal, and thus correlation does not imply causation. I love their use of fMRIs, though. Damn, wish I could volunteer for the other studies of this.
posted by Deoridhe at 4:34 PM on November 5, 2014


I have to admit, I'm baffled by this. I have a very strong disgust response and I'm about as progressive as they come

Isn't that the thing, though? Both conservative and liberal (per the test metrics) respondents reported feeling disgust at the gross images. But their brains, apparently, processed or reacted to that disgust differently.

It's like adding emotions and politics into that "is your color blue the same as my color blue?" question.
posted by postcommunism at 6:58 PM on November 5, 2014


I think Elvis Costello summed up conservatives very well when he said: 'I was looking at the black and white world -
It seemed so exciting ...'
posted by McMillan's Other Wife at 6:19 AM on November 6, 2014


condour75: IamBroom: Joking aside, I didn't really mean that it has to explain Dennis Miller because of his IQ (or, as proxy, ability to rattle off middlebrow cultural references). Just that it has to explain the mutability of political beliefs. (Dennis Miller being a poster child for sudden post-911 right wing conversion)
Ah, my mistake, sorry. I just couldn't parse what you were implying.
condour75: II guess I'd just love to see an Oliver Sacks-style case study of a person who suffered brain damage in the disgust area, and whose political views did a 180.
Yeah, that would be UBER fascinating, indeed. In either direction.
posted by IAmBroom at 9:32 AM on November 6, 2014


jammy: Out of 7.125 billion people in the whole world.

83 people.

I really don't understand how this is supposed to be significant. I know there's the comforting notion of - "There's *two* kinds of people in the world" - but this "study" is hardly a justification.
And you won't be able to to understand it without a serious grounding in statistics. Simply put,
If there are N people in the study,
and there are 2 possible outcome choice (grossed out versus not grossed out),
and two possible influence choices (conservative versus liberal),
AND the influences line up with the outcome choices well enough,
we can say with X% confidence that conservatives are more grossed out than liberals (or the other way around) by these photos.

Naturally, all of these numbers have precise mathematical values. If N isn't high enough, or the amount by which influences line up with outcomes isn't distinct enough, the conclusion is: we don't know.

I'm not going to wade through the math in the study for you; instead, I'm going to suggest that a single study that seems to indicate something interesting should be followed up by another, done by a completely different group, to back it up (or cause doubt).
posted by IAmBroom at 9:39 AM on November 6, 2014 [1 favorite]


I first read about this study on ScienceDaily a few days ago:
Liberal or conservative? Reactions to disgust are a dead giveaway

Summary:
The way a person's brain responds to a single disgusting image is enough to reliably predict whether he or she identifies politically as liberal or conservative. As we approach Election Day, the researchers say that the findings come as a reminder of something we all know but probably don't always do: 'Think, don't just react.'
Notice anything odd about that 'summary'?

It doesn't specify whether liberals or conservatives are more prone to reactions of disgust.

And the astonishing thing, to me, is that the rest of the article doesn't either!

I could not tell from anything on that page which way the results of the study went, but assumed that conservatives were more disgusted because the general framing of the article (and the study) seems to be that this is a sign that those who feel more disgust react to issues instead of thinking about them, and is therefore unfavorable to that side of the political divide, and because I've seen indications before that the overall editorial stance of ScienceDaily leans conservative.

But that they're evidently willing to scrub stories they choose to report on of anything that might be explicitly unfavorable to conservatives shocks me -- though I'm not actually disgusted, of course.
posted by jamjam at 10:55 AM on November 6, 2014 [1 favorite]


I'm curious whether this extends to caricature and insult. I have noticed -- perhaps confirmation bias, to be sure -- that a lot of conservatives react very strongly to nasty language. For example, here in Wisconsin, people demonstrating against the Walker anti-union law in 2011 were dubbed "thugs" and satirical signs were indicators that liberals had potty mouths and couldn't act decently around normal people or whatever. Yesterday on a community discussion, following Walker's re-election, a conservative was asking why Republicans got such hostility from liberals and in the discussion this came up again as someone expressed that hostility and another conservative (probably another) said again that liberals just resort to name-calling. Is there an innate sensitivity that is culturally surfacing here, similar to the "disgust" mechanism? Or is it simply an expression of a power dynamic, pure and simple?
posted by dhartung at 1:26 PM on November 6, 2014


I'm impressed - that is a huge number of people to scan!

Like others, I was curious about the disgusting images they used. The supplementary info of the research article -- which is labeled as open-access, and if you have trouble accessing it, MeMail me! -- states that there were "9 core/contamination (e.g., a dirty toilet) and 11 animal reminder (e.g., mutilated body) pictures." People sat in the scanner as they saw these images, and then provided ratings of them afterward. For "disgusting" images, people rated them on a 0-9 scale on disgustingness; similar for "threatening" images and "pleasant" images.

As another MeFite mentioned upthread, the liberal, moderate, and conservative groups did not rate the images differently -- everyone thought the disgusting images were indeed disgusting. The differences are in the neural responses to the disgusting stimuli. Specifically, the authors mentioned, the "disgust: animal remainder" category was the only image category that evoked different networks of processing in conservative and liberal brains. The authors sounded surprised by this, and I, too, share their surprise that these groups didn't also process the threatening images differently.
posted by nicodine at 2:11 PM on November 6, 2014


Surprised no one has commented yet on the overlaps between this study and the one discussed in this other recent thread.

In the other thread, the phrase "embodied cognition" is being thrown around, meaning, I take it, the idea that the state of your physical body affects not just the way you think (like being tired makes you slow), but actually affects what you think (like having to pee makes you not believe in free will).

So -- does feeling like you're going to gag make you want to vote Republican? Are the different neural responses maybe associated with some kind of more physical reaction? Is this embodied cognition?
posted by OnceUponATime at 2:41 PM on November 6, 2014


If N isn't high enough, or the amount by which influences line up with outcomes isn't distinct enough, the conclusion is: we don't know.

Exactly - 83 people is not high enough and the "influences" and "outcomes" are not distinct at all.
posted by jammy at 4:36 AM on November 7, 2014


Hunh -- I missed that it was specifically (and only) "animal-reminder" images which evoked a different disgust reaction in people who later fell into the conservative group:
When we examined the prediction accuracy of each disgust subcondition (core/contamination and animal reminder), only animal-reminder disgust (e.g., mutilated body) was a strong predictor of political attitudes
That's also really interesting. Is animal-reminder about dissolving the distinction between humans and other fleshy animals, or is it more about bodily violation? Or both?
posted by postcommunism at 6:04 AM on November 7, 2014


jammy: Exactly - 83 people is not high enough and the "influences" and "outcomes" are not distinct at all.

Since you're making two quantitative statements about the study, would you mind showing your work? Or at least stating what size population is high enough (to the nearest whole number, of course) for the confidence level you used? And, obviously, what that confidence level is.

It's not valid to criticize a scientific paper by simply declaring it "not good enough".
posted by IAmBroom at 9:18 PM on November 8, 2014 [3 favorites]


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