The Behavioral Immune System Shapes Political Intuitions
Why and How Individual Differences in Disgust Sensitivity Underlie Opposition to Immigration
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3562045 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Lene Aarøe (0000-0003-4551-3750, Aarhus University), Michael Bang Petersen (0000-0002-6782-5635, Aarhus University), Kevin Arceneaux (0000-0002-2884-5238, Temple University) |
| Year | 2017 |
| Volume | 111 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 277-294 |
| Publication date | 2017-05-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | American Political Science Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0003-0554 • E-ISSN: 1537-5943 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/s0003055416000770 |
| OpenAlex | W2605681423 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 126 |
| References cited | 86 |
We present, test, and extend a theoretical framework that connects disgust, a powerful basic human emotion, to political attitudes through psychological mechanisms designed to protect humans from disease. These mechanisms work outside of conscious awareness, and in modern environments, they can motivate individuals to avoid intergroup contact by opposing immigration. We report a meta-analysis of previous tests in the psychological sciences and conduct, for the first time, a series of tests in nationally representative samples collected in the United States and Denmark that integrate the role of disgust and the behavioral immune system into established models of emotional processing and political attitude formation. In doing so, we offer an explanation for why peaceful integration and interaction between ethnic majority and minorities is so hard to achieve
Anger · Cognitive psychology · Disgust · Ethnic group · Immigration · Opposition (politics · Political science · Politics · Emotions and Moral Behavior · Law · Psychology · Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment · Social and Intergroup Psychology · Social Psychology
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Does mislabeling Covid-19 elicit the perception of threat and reduce blame?
Contemporary parasite stress curvilinearly correlates with outgroup trust
The behavioral immune system is designed to avoid infected individuals, not outgroups
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Psychological characteristics associated with Covid-19 vaccine hesitancy and resistance in Ireland and the United Kingdom
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“There Was Blood Coming Out of Her Eyes . . .”
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Contamination fear in the time of the Covid-19 pandemic
Changes in perceived vulnerability to disease, resilience, and disgust sensitivity during the pandemic
Open to Debate
Disgusting Democrats and Repulsive Republicans
Political Attitudes and Disease Threat
Are Members of Political Out-Groups More Morally or Physically Disgusting
Pathogen avoidance versus anger
Parasites, Herbivores and Dried Fish
Exposure to Immigrants Does Not Moderate the Relationship Between Disgust Sensitivity and Opposition to Immigration
Evolution, Morality and the Fabric of Society
A matter of taste
Political Ideology Predicts Perceptions of the Threat of Covid-19 (and Susceptibility to Fake News About It)
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Disgust sensitivity relates to attitudes toward gay men and lesbian women across 31 nations
The Politics of Contagion
A Liberal Polity
Pro-trade nationalists and protectionist xenophobes? The conditional effects of psychological factors on trade attitudes
Does Individual Health Have Implications for Individuals’ Attitudes towards Minority Groups? A Case Study from the Greek Population
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Causation and Behavior
Does Predisposition Toward Disgust Affect Emotional Response to Political Leaders? Evidence from the 2012 U.S. Presidential Election
Verständigungsbarrieren zwischen kulturalistischen Sozialwissenschaften und evolutionärer Anthropologie
Disgust sensitivity and opposition to immigration
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Fear and Favoritism in the Time of Covid-19
Universality and diversity in human song
Conservatives and liberals have similar physiological responses to threats
The Hierarchy of Victims
Pandemic threat and authoritarian attitudes in Europe
Discrimination against mobile European Union citizens before and during the first Covid-19 lockdown
The scope of exclusionary public response to the European refugee crisis
Disgust Sensitivity and Public Demand for Protection
A State of the Art on Emotions in the Context of Public Policymaking
Emotional Responses Shape the Substance of Information Seeking under Conditions of Threat
Crowding at the ballot box
Being of one mind
Salience of infectious diseases did not increase xenophobia during the Covid-19 pandemic
Symptoms and Stereotypes
The smoke-detector principle of pathogen avoidance
The Psychophysiology of Political Ideology
Locked Down, Lashing Out
Infectious Disease, Disgust, and Imagining the Other
Southern politics in State and Nation
Elevated disgust sensitivity in the first trimester of pregnancy
Parasite primes make foreign-accented English sound more distant to people who are disgusted by pathogens (but not by sex or morality)
Facial disfigurement is treated like an infectious disease
The Rationalizing Voter
The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion
The Oxford Handbook of Political Psychology
What and Where are the Primary Affects? Some Evidence for a Theory
Pathogen-avoidance mechanisms and the stigmatization of obese people
The Disgust Scale
Individual differences in sensitivity to disgust
Conservatives are more easily disgusted than liberals
Disgust
The behavioral immune system and social conservatism
Evolved Disease-Avoidance Processes and Contemporary Anti-Social Behavior
Perceived vulnerability to disease
Differences in negativity bias underlie variations in political ideology
Individual differences in reasoning
Disgust Sensitivity and the Neurophysiology of Left-Right Political Orientations
Renovating the Pyramid of Needs
Disgust as an adaptive system for disease avoidance behaviour
Biology, Politics, and the Emerging Science of Human Nature
Danger, Disease, and the Nature of Prejudice(s)
Disease avoidance and ethnocentrism
Parasite-stress promotes in-group assortative sociality
Universal dimensions of social cognition
Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science
Disgust Sensitivity, Political Conservatism, and Voting
Race and Place
Anxious Politics
Evolved Disease-Avoidance Mechanisms and Contemporary Xenophobic Attitudes
Keeping the vermin out
An analysis of public opinion toward undocumented immigration
An analysis of public opinion toward undocumented immigration
The Trump Hypothesis
Gender and Physiological Effects in Connecting Disgust to Political Preferences
The role of intergroup disgust in predicting negative outgroup evaluations
The Politics of European Union Immigration Policy
Educated Preferences
Immigration and the new politics of inclusion and exclusion in the European Union
Contemporary American Attitudes toward U.S. Immigration
Disgust Sensitivity and Public Demand for Protection
Public Opinion Toward Immigration Reform
Election Night’s Alright for Fighting
Understanding the 2008 Presidential Election
The Nature of Political Ideology in the Contemporary Electorate
Mutual Interests
Alternative Measures of American National Identity
The Effect of Education on Nationalism and Ethnic Exclusionism
Evolutionary Political Psychology
Understanding the Determinants of Political Ideology
Social Welfare as Small‐Scale Help
Cognitive Biases and the Strength of Political Arguments
Emotional Substrates of White Racial Attitudes
Economic Explanations for Opposition to Immigration
The Deservingness Heuristic and the Politics of Health Care
Different Emotional Reactions to Different Groups
Microbes, mating, and morality
Do needs for security and certainty predict cultural and economic conservatism? A cross-national analysis
A meta-analytic test of intergroup contact theory
The unbearable automaticity of being
Recent advances in intergroup contact theory
What Triggers Public Opposition to Immigration? Anxiety, Group Cues, and Immigration Threat
Meat Is Good to Taboo
Disgust as a disease-avoidance mechanism
Strangers Next Door. Ethnic Relations in American Communities
Political conservatism as motivated social cognition
Personality and Civic Engagement
Predisposing Factors and Situational Triggers
Attitudes toward Highly Skilled and Low-skilled Immigration
Strangers Next Door
| Unique citing works | 126 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 12,6 |
| Citation span | 2016 - 2026 (11) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | Yes |
| Citation types | Neutral: 122 |