The Trump campaign has stunned bemused pundits by growing in strength with every controversy and outrageous policy proposal, Alexander Hurst notes, and disgust may play a role in his success:
In 2012, a team of academics from Europe and the U.S.—Yoel Inbar, David Pizarro, Ravi Iyer, and Jonathan Haidt—published a paper titled “Disgust Sensitivity, Political Conservatism, and Voting,” looking at the role disgust plays in political orientation. The researchers posited three different types of disgust: interpersonal disgust (i.e., the feeling produced by drinking from the same cup as someone else); core disgust (the response to maggots, vomit, dirty toilets, etc.); and animal-reminder disgust (how we react to corpses, blood, anything that evokes our animal nature).
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Even when controlling for age, education, geography, and religious belief, individuals with higher “disgust sensitivity” were found to be more likely to tolerate wealth inequality, view homosexuality negatively, and place more belief in authoritarian leaders and systems.
Most strikingly, interpersonal disgust was an important predictor of anti-immigrant attitudes.
Trump, of course, is a well-known, admitted germaphobe. “One of the curses of American society is the simple act of shaking hands,” he wrote in The Art of the Deal. “I happen to be a clean hands freak. I feel much better after I thoroughly wash my hands, which I do as much as possible.”
Trump even described shaking hands as “barbaric” in an interview with Dateline in 1999, saying, “They have medical reports all the time. Shaking hands, you catch colds, you catch the flu, you catch it, you catch all sorts of things. Who knows what you don’t catch?”
Beyond the aversion to hand-shaking, Trump used to pre-test his dates for AIDS, and reportedly avoids pushing elevator buttons.
The connection between modern xenophobia, disgust sensitivity, and the strength of Trump’s campaign is fairly easy to make. As Inbar, Pizarro, Iyer, and Haidt point out, “Disgust evolved not just to protect individuals form oral contamination by potential foods, but also from the possibility of contamination by contact with unfamiliar individuals or groups.” And after all, Trump’s success has come not from presenting voters with detailed policy proposals, but from connecting with them on a gut level.
If liberals find themselves immune to such appeals, it may be because liberals and conservatives have different physiological reactions to disgusting images and situations. Last year, researchers at Virginia Tech observed liberal and conservative brains under fMRI machines, and found that, “Remarkably, brain responses to a single disgusting stimulus were sufficient to make accurate predictions about an individual subject’s political ideology.” Furthermore, they showed that our emotional responses are tightly intertwined with our belief systems.
Not wild about shaking hands either, but it beats the near universal obligatory hug. Of course, that’s kind of a progressive thing.