alt:
"The Behavioral Immune System Shapes Political Intuitions: Why and
How Individual Differences in Disgust Sensitivity Underlie
Opposition to Immigration
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."