People who are easily disgusted tend to hold more conservative political views, but a new study indicates that this connection depends heavily on how well individuals tune into their own bodily sensations. The research suggests that the link between feeling disgust and identifying as a conservative is strongest in those who are less aware of their internal physical states. The findings were published in Politics and the Life Sciences.
To understand these findings, it helps to look at two psychological concepts: disgust sensitivity and interoceptive sensibility. Disgust sensitivity refers to how intensely and easily a person experiences disgust in response to things like germs, taboo sexual acts, or moral violations like lying. Interoceptive sensibility is a person’s conscious awareness of their internal bodily signals. For instance, it involves noticing a racing heartbeat, a tense stomach, or shallow breathing during an emotional moment.
Early studies in political psychology suggested that visceral reactions to threat and disgust drive conservative political beliefs. A 2008 study reported that people with stronger involuntary physical reactions to startling or disturbing images leaned more politically conservative. Following this line of thought, research covered by PsyPost in 2019 found a psychological association in which higher self-reported disgust sensitivity predicted higher endorsement of conservative political beliefs.
Later large-scale replications challenged the biological aspect of this narrative, failing to find a dependable link between physical reactions and political ideology. A 2019 replication study found no evidence that conservatives and liberals actually differ in their automatic physiological responses to threats. Three studies covered by PsyPost in 2020 also failed to reproduce the idea that conservatives exhibit stronger physical threat responses.
This created a puzzle in the field of political psychology. Why do self-reported feelings of disgust consistently predict political ideology, even when automatic bodily reactions do not? The study was conducted by Mariana von Mohr, now a lecturer in social and affective neuroscience at the University of Kent, and Manos Tsakiris at the Centre for the Politics of Feelings. The researchers sought to address this stalemate by testing whether a person’s conscious awareness of their internal bodily signals explains why the connection appears in some people but not others.
“There is a long-standing idea that political attitudes are linked to emotional responses such as disgust, but this relationship has been surprisingly inconsistent across studies,” von Mohr told PsyPost. “We wondered whether interoception might help explain why.”
To explore this, the researchers recruited 632 adults from the United States through an online survey platform. The sample was evenly split by design, featuring 321 participants who identified as Democrats and 311 who identified as Republicans. The participants completed a series of questionnaires designed to measure their bodily awareness, their disgust triggers, and their political leanings.
To measure interoceptive sensibility, participants answered questions about how often they notice changes in their body, whether they trust their physical sensations, and how they use bodily cues to regulate their emotions. To measure disgust sensitivity, the researchers used a scale that divides disgust into three domains. These domains included pathogen disgust (like stepping on dog waste), sexual disgust (like hearing strangers engage in sexual acts), and moral disgust (like deceiving a friend).
Finally, the participants reported their political ideology on a seven-point scale ranging from very liberal to very conservative. They also confirmed their political party affiliation. The researchers then used statistical models to see how disgust sensitivity, bodily awareness, and political ideology interacted with one another.
Overall, the results confirmed past findings: higher overall disgust sensitivity was associated with a greater likelihood of identifying as a Republican and holding a conservative ideology. However, the researchers found that interoceptive sensibility changed the strength of this relationship. The connection between disgust and conservatism was most prominent among individuals who reported low awareness of their bodily sensations.
Among people with low interoceptive sensibility, those who were highly sensitive to disgust were highly likely to identify as Republicans. Statistical estimates showed that a person with high disgust sensitivity and low bodily awareness had a 64.1% probability of identifying as a Republican. They also scored on the more conservative end of the ideology scale.
In contrast, this relationship weakened among people who were highly attuned to their bodily signals. For individuals with high interoceptive sensibility, having high disgust sensitivity resulted in only a 55.4% probability of identifying as a Republican. For this group, the link between feeling easily disgusted and holding conservative views was not statistically significant after certain data corrections were applied.
When the researchers looked at the three specific domains of disgust, they found that moral disgust was the primary driver of these results. Pathogen disgust and sexual disgust did not show the same interaction with bodily awareness. The tendency for low bodily awareness to strengthen the link between disgust and conservatism was specific to situations involving moral violations and broken social norms.
“The main takeaway is that the relationship between disgust and political orientation may be more conditional than is often assumed,” von Mohr noted. “More broadly, our findings suggest that understanding the link between emotions and political attitudes may require looking not only at what people feel, but also at how much they attend to the bodily signals accompanying those feelings.”
The authors suggest that when people are less tuned into their actual physical sensations, they might rely more on socially acquired meanings to interpret their feelings. Disgust is a complex emotion shaped by culture, and conservative political frameworks often place a heavy emphasis on moral purity.
“One possibility is that people who pay less attention to their internal bodily signals may rely more on socially learned expectations to interpret what they are feeling, including ideas about what is disgusting, inappropriate, or morally wrong,” von Mohr explained. “In other words, when bodily cues are less salient, contextual and socially learned information may play a greater role in shaping how an emotion is interpreted.”
If a person is not closely monitoring their internal physical state, they might lean on these cultural scripts to make sense of what they are feeling. On the other hand, individuals who are highly attuned to their internal signals might ground their emotional experiences more in their actual biology. Because they rely more on their direct physical sensations to figure out how they feel, social and political framing might play a smaller role in their emotional interpretations. This could explain why their feelings of disgust do not map as strongly onto their political party or ideology.
There are a few things to keep in mind about this research. The data is based entirely on self-reported surveys at a single point in time, which means the study cannot determine whether feeling disgusted causes someone to become conservative, or vice versa.
“It is important not to interpret these findings as showing that bodily processes determine someone’s political beliefs, or that people with one political orientation are simply more or less ‘in touch’ with their bodies,” von Mohr clarified. She emphasized that the idea that people with lower interoceptive sensibility may rely more on socially learned interpretations is just one possible explanation for the pattern they observed, rather than something they directly tested.
The researchers also note that the direction of this relationship might depend heavily on the specific culture being studied. In a different society where liberals moralize a different set of disgust triggers, the ideological pattern might look different. Additionally, the study did not measure actual physiological responses, such as heart rate or skin conductance. The researchers measured how aware people thought they were of their bodies, rather than their objective ability to detect physical changes.
“The next step is to test the mechanism more directly,” von Mohr said. “A particularly important direction is to incorporate physiological measures, for example by examining autonomic responses such as heart rate or skin conductance while people are exposed to disgust-evoking stimuli.”
“This would allow us to distinguish more clearly between the bodily response itself, how accurately or strongly people perceive that response, and how they subsequently interpret it,” she added. “Ultimately, the broader goal is to understand how physiological responses, awareness of those responses, and socially learned meanings interact in shaping political attitudes, rather than treating emotion, physiology, and ideology as separate influences.”
The study, “The embodied roots of ideology: Interoceptive sensibility moderates the link between disgust sensitivity and political orientation,” was authored by Mariana Von Mohr and Manos Tsakiris.