Faculty Articles
Disgusting Democrats and Repulsive Republicans: Members of Political Outgroups Are Considered Physically Gross.
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
12-29-2021
Publication Title
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
Volume
49
Issue/Number
3
First Page
361
ISSN
1552-7433
Last Page
375
Abstract/Excerpt
The status of disgust as a sociomoral emotion is debated. We conducted a stringent test of whether social stimuli (specifically, political outgroup members) can elicit physical disgust, as distinct from moral or metaphorical disgust. We employed stimuli (male faces) matched on baseline disgustingness, provided other ways for participants to express negativity toward outgroup members, and used concrete self-report measures of disgust, as well as a nonverbal measure (participants’ facial expressions). Across three preregistered studies (total N = 915), we found that political outgroup members are judged to be “disgusting,” although this effect is generally weaker for concrete self-report measures and absent for the nonverbal measure. This suggests that social stimuli are capable of eliciting genuine physical disgust, although it is not always outwardly expressed, and the strength of this result depends on the measures employed. We discuss implications of these results for research on sociomoral emotions and American politics.
DOI
10.1177/01461672211065923
ORCID ID
0000-0002-4082-9505
PubMed ID
34964418
NSUWorks Citation
Landy, J. F.,
Rottman, J.,
Batres, C.,
Leimgruber, K. L.
(2021). Disgusting Democrats and Repulsive Republicans: Members of Political Outgroups Are Considered Physically Gross.. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 49(3), 361-375.
Available at: https://nsuworks.nova.edu/cps_facarticles/2015
Comments
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