The idea that conservatives are more sensitive to disgust than liberals is a basic tenet of political psychology — and it may be a mere artifact of self-reports

Investigating the conservatism-disgust paradox in reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic: A reexamination of the interrelations among political ideology, disgust sensitivity, and pandemic response. Benjamin C. Ruisch et al. PLoS One, November 4, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0275440

Abstract: Research has documented robust associations between greater disgust sensitivity and (1) concerns about disease, and (2) political conservatism. However, the COVID-19 disease pandemic raised challenging questions about these associations. In particular, why have conservatives—despite their greater disgust sensitivity—exhibited less concern about the pandemic? Here, we investigate this “conservatism-disgust paradox” and address several outstanding theoretical questions regarding the interrelations among disgust sensitivity, ideology, and pandemic response. In four studies (N = 1,764), we identify several methodological and conceptual factors—in particular, an overreliance on self-report measures—that may have inflated the apparent associations among these constructs. Using non-self-report measures, we find evidence that disgust sensitivity may be a less potent predictor of disease avoidance than is typically assumed, and that ideological differences in disgust sensitivity may be amplified by self-report measures. These findings suggest that the true pattern of interrelations among these factors may be less “paradoxical” than is typically believed.

General discussion

This research provides important insight into the conservatism-disgust paradox in responses to the pandemic, as well as the relations among each of these target constructs—disgust sensitivity, political ideology, and pandemic response. These studies identified multiple factors that influence the (apparent) strength of the relations among these variables, thereby pinpointing several factors that are likely to have contributed to this seemingly contradictory pattern of results (Table 3).

Table 3. List of hypotheses, the study in which each hypothesis was tested, and whether or not each hypothesis was supported.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0275440.t003

One contributing factor appears to be the predominant use of self-report measures of pandemic response in past research. Indeed, using a behavioral measure of virtual social distancing, we found that the relations between pandemic response and both ideology and disgust sensitivity were significantly attenuated, compared with self-report pandemic response measures. These findings are consistent with the possibility that these self-report measures may suffer from IV-DV conceptual overlap, while also being more susceptible to social desirability and other reporting biases [36–38]. Particularly given that this same virtual behavioral measure has been shown to out-predict self-reports in predicting who contracts the COVID-19 virus [21], these results suggest that behavioral measures of pandemic response may provide a more accurate estimate of the extent of ideological differences in responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as of the predictive power of disgust sensitivity for pandemic response. We found a similar divergence between self-report and non-self-report measures in the domain of disgust sensitivity. In this case, however, it was our experiential measure of disgust sensitivity that was the more powerful predictor of pandemic response. These findings identify important additional caveats and considerations for research examining the impact of disgust sensitivity on real-world outcomes, suggesting, in line with some past research, that self-reports of disgust sensitivity may correlate only modestly with other, more experiential or indirect indices of sensitivity to disgust—and that these measures/operationalizations may have different predictive power for different kinds of attitudes and behavior.

These findings also provide a means of beginning to reconcile some of the puzzling associations uncovered in other research on the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, recent work suggests that—despite the putative disease-protective function of disgust—individuals who scored higher on self-reported disgust sensitivity may actually have been more likely to contract COVID-19 than those who self-reported less disgust sensitivity [23]. As documented here, however, self-reported disgust sensitivity appears to be only a relatively weak predictor of behavioral responses to the pandemic (indeed, adjusting for our experiential disgust measure rendered this association effectively nonexistent). Thus, although questions remain, these findings may bring us a step closer to understanding how self-reported disgust sensitivity could be a positive predictor of contracting the COVID-19 virus.

Perhaps the most intriguing findings, however, concern the relation of political ideology to self-report and experiential measures of disgust sensitivity. Using the DS-R, we replicated the well-documented ideological differences in self-reported disgust sensitivity. However, using our more experiential measure of disgust sensitivity—which presented participants with visual stimuli that closely corresponded to those described in the DS-R vignettes—we found no evidence of liberal-conservative differences in sensitivity to disgust.

Taken together, the findings discussed above suggest that methodological features of past research—particularly the heavy reliance on self-report measures of disgust sensitivity and pandemic response—may have inflated the relations among these three variables, and, thus, contributed to this seemingly contradictory pattern of results. In identifying the influence of these methodological factors, this research brings us a step closer to resolving the conservatism-disgust paradox, suggesting that the true pattern of interrelations among these variables is not as “paradoxical” as is typically assumed. That is, if, as these findings suggest, (1) the true relation between disgust sensitivity and pandemic response is smaller than previously suggested, and (2) ideological differences in disgust sensitivity are overestimated, then it is less surprising that conservatives exhibit less concern about the virus—particularly given that (3) ideological differences in responses to the pandemic may not be as dramatic as has been suggested by past research. The relatively small size of these effects makes it more likely that they would be subsumed by other concerns and motivations such as ideological identification and elite cues.

More generally, these findings also pose some challenges for past research and theory—particularly work suggesting a general relation between disgust sensitivity and political ideology. At the very least, these findings appear to suggest that liberals and conservatives do not differ in the form of disgust sensitivity that is most predictive of pandemic response. A more pessimistic interpretation, however, is that ideological differences in disgust sensitivity may generally be overestimated. That is, consistent with some recent critiques, it may be that self-report measures such as the DS-R amplify the true degree of ideological differences in disgust sensitivity, at least compared with measures that rely less on self-reports and self-beliefs about one’s own sensitivity to disgust.

Of course, our findings stand in contrast to a large body of research that suggests a connection between ideology and disgust, and, clearly, liberals and conservatives do reliably differ on many measures of disgust sensitivity (in particular, the DS-R and similar vignette-based measures). However, our findings also seem to align with other recent failures to replicate ideological differences in sensitivity to disgust using more indirect or experiential measures (e.g., [45]). Particularly in light of other research suggesting that people may have limited introspective ability into their own level of disgust sensitivity (e.g., work showing that self-reports sometimes do not significantly correlate with more indirect measures of disgust sensitivity; e.g., [18, 57, 58]) a closer examination of the nature and extent of ideological differences in disgust sensitivity may be warranted.

These findings therefore suggest that there may be a theoretical gap in our understanding of the relation between ideology and disgust sensitivity: Why is it that ideological differences reliably emerge on some measures of disgust sensitivity (e.g., the DS-R) but not others—even, as we found, measures that assess responses to closely related, or even identical, situations and stimuli? One possibility is that the ideological differences on the DS-R and similar vignette-based measures of sensitivity to disgust can in part be attributed to factors other than disgust sensitivity per se.

For example, forthcoming research suggests that conservatives tend to self-report greater interoceptive sensitivity—that is, to subjectively feel that they are more sensitive to the internal physiological states and signals of their own bodies—although by objective metrics they are actually less sensitive than are liberals [68]. Moreover, other research suggests that conservatives’ overconfidence may extend beyond interoception to experiences, judgments, and perceptions writ large [69]. Extending these past findings to the domain of disgust sensitivity would seem to suggest that conservatives may be likely to subjectively feel that they are more sensitive to disgust than they actually are, perhaps explaining why self-report measures of disgust sensitivity—which in part assess self-beliefs about one’s own degree of sensitivity to disgust—show more robust associations with conservatism than measures of disgust that are rooted in more immediate experience.

Less interestingly, another potential explanation for the weaker relation between ideology and our experiential disgust measure may be that previously documented ideological differences in personality traits such as conscientiousness [70] lead conservatives to complete survey measures more thoughtfully, perhaps reading more carefully or engaging more deeply with the material. This, too, could help explain why conservatives report experiencing greater disgust in response to these vignettes—which require a degree of cognitive effort to process and mentally represent—but do not appear to differ as greatly when these same stimuli are presented visually. Future research may wish to assess these possibilities to deepen our understanding of the nature of the relation between ideology and sensitivity to disgust.

More generally, these findings suggest that caution may be warranted in the development and use of measures to assess these constructs—disgust sensitivity, political ideology, and pandemic response—and, especially, their interrelations. Given the close connections among these factors, coupled with potential confounds such as self-presentational concerns that may be at play for such impactful and politicized issues as the COVID-19 pandemic, the use of self-report measures, in particular, should be subject to close scrutiny.

Finally, it is important to note that while our studies consistently show that using self-report scales may overestimate the strength of the interrelations among disgust sensitivity, pandemic response, and political ideology, some of these effects may be specific to the population that we sampled. Indeed, the sociopolitical context surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S. was in many ways unique, and these factors are likely to have shaped some of our effects. In particular, as discussed above, the stark political polarization surrounding the pandemic in the U.S. is likely to have been at least partially responsible for the inflated ideological differences in self-reported (versus behavioral) responses to the pandemic. Future research will need to examine the degree to which these processes extend beyond the U.S. to other nations and cultural contexts.