Reaction to odors can predict political bent according to study
Your Uber driver really needs a shower. A co-worker should change his socks. You wonder whether your gym’s management might have a word with a particularly smelly regular.
The level of disgust you feel at these olfactory offenders could reveal more about your social and political views than you know, says new research.
Research published this week found that the degree of disgust that an individual feels when confronted by the smell of body odors rather accurately predicts his or her inclinations toward authoritarianism.
The research found that the higher the level of disgust a person evinces upon detecting these odors, the more likely he or she is to favor a rigid social order — with designated roles for different genders and ethnic groups — and to support punitive responses to social, legal and moral transgressions.
Conducted in Sweden, the new research was published this week in the British journal Royal Society Open Science.
It may not be nice to talk about bad breath, stinky feet, sweaty body odor or the smell of feces, urine or intestinal gas, but we pretty much all notice it. Some of us shrug and move on. But some of us feel true moral outrage at the very whiff of it.
And with some good reason. Our sense of smell, after all, is one of our most primitive defenses against the dangers of spoiled food, contagious disease and hazards that might lead to death.
Walk into a cave with the stench of a decomposing body, and the disgust that would make you run away and never return might well allow you to live long and propagate your genes. A more relaxed approach to putrid smells, by contrast, could spell your early demise.
But as humans began to live in social groups, that disgust appears to have proved protective in new and different ways. Dislike of foreign people and their unfamiliar social practices likely protected some early humans from hostile invaders and from pathogens against which they had no immunity.
No surprise, then, that neuroscientists peering into the modern brain at work see little difference between physical revulsion — disgust — and moral indignation — which, as luck would have it, we also call disgust. Whether this powerful human emotion is a response to people or customs we find strange or to smells we find funky, it activates much of the same brain machinery.
And in modern societies, it makes sense that people who have a preference for order, tradition and familiar people would choose policies and leaders that would tightly control society and harshly punish rule-breakers. People who are more tolerant of chaos, novelty and the occasional whiff of danger or subversion would be drawn to less authoritarian government.
The authors of the new research build on a field of study intent on illuminating the ways in which cognitive styles, personality traits and genetic influences might give rise to certain political leanings.
Researchers in this field have found links between those inclined to disgust sensitivity and “ethnocentrism,” or a preference for one’s own kind. They’ve found differences in disgust sensitivity that appear to distinguish American liberals from conservatives. And there’s very mixed evidence that people who would describe themselves as conservative in the United States are inclined more than liberals toward negative emotions such as fear and disgust.