"27 strange non-political scenarios will appear. Please respond honestly and alone and we'll guess your brain's political ideology."

I enjoyed taking this test, which is premised on the notion that susceptibility to disgust is at the root of political orientation.

For the record, I'm 59% Democrat.

Here's an article in Psychology Today: "Are You Easily Disgusted? You May Be a Conservative."

Because of its role in survival as well as the particularly old region of the brain (anterior insula) that is most active when people experience disgust, it is often described as one of the original emotions and thought of as a building block for other emotions.

So what's the political connection? Evidence suggests that harm avoidance and the need for fairness underlie people's moral judgments in a number of cultures. While liberals rely primarily on these two values, conservatives also rely on desires for group loyalty, authoritative structure, and, most importantly here, purity. Following this logic, Kevin and other researchers became interested in the potential for a relation between disgust and political orientations. They speculated that conservatives are more disgust sensitive than liberals as a result of their concern with purity-related norms and that this difference would manifest itself on issues that some may associate with sexual purity (e.g., homosexual sex and, therefore, gay rights).

Sure enough, Kevin and his co-authors found that conservatives are more easily disgusted than liberals.....

This makes me wonder if all the recent encouragement to be disgusted by sexual behavior is going to have the unintended consequence of making the new generation more conservative. 

And here's a TED talk by Cornell psychologist David Pizarro on the subject of disgust and political orientation:



I note that there's a difference between: 1. Really feeling disgust, deep in your nervous system, and 2. Having the intellectual opinion that it's better not to be a squeamish person (or better to hold yourself to a high standard of cleanliness). When you take the quiz, it's hard not to be more in the second realm, and that leads to a third category: 3. Knowing that you want to be liberal/conservative and that the key is susceptibility to disgust, you'll just decide you're not too disgusted or you're really disgusted based on your desire to confirm your own politics. Or even a fourth category: 4. Once you know a bunch of scientists are saying political orientation is rooted in feelings of disgust, you're going to resist disgust, because you're conservative, and you like proving these scientists wrong.

Hope you did the test before I screwed it up for you!