The Behavioral Immune System Shapes Political Intuitions: Why and How Individual Differences in Disgust Sensitivity Underlie Opposition to Immigration
By Lene Aarøe, M. Petersen, Kevin Arceneaux. American Political Science Review, 2017
193 citations recorded by the source corpus.
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.
Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2400ac8af9a4cc23ae4d7bc6474be9ee53074e0e
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In Social Psychology
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Citations in the corpus
- Political Ideology Predicts Perceptions of the Threat of COVID-19 (and Susceptibility to Fake News About It) (2020, background): “These differences in threat sensitivity may help explain differences among liberals and conservatives on policy issues such as immigration (Aarøe et al., 2017) and gun control (Celinska, 2007).”