Cambridge Study Reveals Higher Disgusts Sensitivity Linked To Being A Republican

2026-09-27T14:51:27Z

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.

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.

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.

Full article & Study:

https://www.psypost.org/disgust-predicts-conservative-views-most-strongly-in-people-with-low-bodily-awareness/

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/politics-and-the-life-sciences/article/embodied-roots-of-ideology-interoceptive-sensibility-moderates-the-link-between-disgust-sensitivity-and-political-orientation/D2BA674CF157C8036D3C16C8AB4384CC