Laid-back Liberals, Uptight Conservatives?

Lead study author David Pizarro, Cornell assistant professor of psychology says the research findings examine the role of emotion and moral judgment, but that these particular results were an unintended and unexpected result of a larger research undertaking.

”My primary interest is in moral judgment, and in the influences of emotion on judgment. The truth is that the findings contained in these two papers (which are at least 5 separate data collections) were a result of unintended findings,” he explains.  

“It has been long recognized that experiencing certain emotions can alter our judgments, perceptions, even memories. So when sad, people think differently than when they are angry. Recently, people had begun to take an interest in disgust and how it influences judgments, and some researchers had shown that being made to feel disgust (say, by showing you gross pictures) could influence a variety of judgments,” Pizarro adds. 

That connection between emotions and judgment begged these questions: “Would people who are more prone to experiencing disgust—that is, more easily grossed out—have different beliefs than those who are less easily disgusted? In particular, would their moral judgments be different?” he tells demo dirt. 

The research team collected data using a disgust sensitivity scale developed by Jonathan Haidt and his colleagues at the University of Virginia, Pizarro explains.  

“This scale has been shown to predict actual behaviors that many find disgusting (such as eating chocolate shaped like feces, [or] dipping one’s hand in a concoction that while absolutely safe is very slimy and gross),” Pizarro explains. 

The research team also included various items about morality to find out if moral judgments correlated with disgust sensitivity (DS). While the team didn’t discover a lot that way, Pizarro says, what really evoked interesting results was a question asking the participants how politically liberal or conservative they were. 

“This was correlated with DS significantly. In two other data collections in which these questions were included the same correlation kept arising,” Pizarro maintains.  

When then-Cornell graduate student Yoel Inbar, who is now at Harvard's Kennedy School asked if he could further investigate these findings, Pizarro said yes.  

Though he himself has little interest in the psychology of politics or the political spectrum, Pizarro says the findings, while “accidental and unwanted”, were so consistent that they merited further investigation. 

Although the professor is an unwilling political commentator, he has faced sharp criticism since the study results were made public, particularly from conservatives and on the conservative blogosphere.

”In terms of actual scientific criticism, not much of interest because many don't bother to read the original articles (showing, for instance, that we studied more than just college students, and that we do not make any arguments that conservatives are more irrational or ‘wussier’ as some have put it,” he says. 

Pizarro contends that personal political beliefs did not play a role in the studies. “Indeed, it is safe to say that at least two of the authors would identify little with many of the beliefs of either party, for what it's worth,” he says.  

Some are so offended by the findings that they choose to reject the results altogether. “Aside from the desire for a larger or more diverse sample (which is always true of these studies), the bulk of criticism that I've encountered is a rejection of the findings because of a perceived liberal agenda to criticize conservatives or to defend gay marriage, [for example],” he adds. 

There have been exceptions, however. “Now, if you believe that a propensity to experience disgust makes you more sensitive to moral truths about gay marriage, then you should have nothing to worry about—this study should be seen as support for your position,” Pizarro adds. “Not to mention that the size of the relationship between DS and politics is fairly small in the grand scheme of things (although of decent size for these types of studies).”

How did the team deal with the inevitable limitations that plague researchers with every study?

”There are always limitations and any good scientist should point them out in the paper. First, it was fairly unfeasible for us to study the entire array of even the American population, so although we made an attempt at getting a more diverse sample (which you can see in the first study), and we control statistically for things like religious affiliation, age, gender, ethnicity, [and so on], you can always make an attempt at getting even larger and more diverse samples,” he says. “We cannot conclude that this is a universal truth.” 

Pizarro also maintains that this is merely a correlation, not causation. “Although we argue that it is more plausible that disgust sensitivity emerges earlier than political orientation, it is quite possible that becoming liberal makes you less disgust-prone, or that becoming conservative makes you more disgust-prone,” he explains. “We are careful not to say that one causes the other, and although I can speculate about the mechanisms that give rise to this relationship, at this point it is just that—speculation.”

The most important message of the study is that we underestimate how powerful a role emotions play in our moral and political judgments.

”Basic emotional mechanisms play a larger role in the formation of moral, political, and social attitudes than many think,” Pizarro says. “While again, we do not know the causal direction of these effects, we do know that inducing disgust makes people judge others more harshly.” 

“What we believe we've documented is a basic emotional tendency (an individual difference in how likely you are disgusted) may play a role in what are generally taken as complex beliefs,” he explains. “And this is not just true for Conservative beliefs, obviously—the converse of our finding is that liberals are less disgusted, obviously.” 

Future research is examining the role of disgust and homophobia. “In a paper that is currently in preparation, we have shown that manipulating disgust in college students (through the use of a foul smell in our laboratory) makes them more likely to report negative feelings toward gays and lesbians,” Pizarro says.  

“We'd like to focus on uncovering the causes behind the observed correlations. We'd also like to see how early tendencies to be disgusted might influence later opinions,” he explains. “In the end, all the authors are experimentalists, so we are always less satisfied with simply demonstrating correlations. We'd like to be able to manipulate things and measure their psychological effects.” 

As for the controversy surrounding the results of the political beliefs study, while Pizarro and his colleagues are confident in their findings, he encourages interested individuals to read the research for themselves.

”There is a lot of emotion surrounding political issues—perhaps now in American politics more than ever,” he says ”Our goal as scientists is not to argue that one political view is flawed, although people may indeed feel as if this is what the data imply. If you object, visit the library or one of our academic websites, download the papers, and feel free to criticize! As scientists we are always looking to improve our methods and reach fair conclusions.”