People who have a greater tendency to turn their nose up at the whiff of urine, sweat and other body odours are more likely to have rightwing authoritarian attitudes, research suggests.
The study also found having a greater disgust for body odours was linked, albeit to a small degree, with support for Donald Trump when he was a presidential candidate.
The team say the findings support the idea that a feeling of disgust might partly underpin social discrimination against others, with the link rooted in a primitive urge to avoid catching diseases from unfamiliar people or environments…
Previous studies have linked levels of disgust to political orientation, with some research suggesting those who identify as conservative have greater aversion to revolting images…
In addition, the studies showed that levels of body odour disgust showed a stronger link to authoritarianism than levels of disgust at the possibility of catching a bug. However, while body odour disgust was linked to rightwing authoritarianism, it was not linked to other measures of political conservatism – although the authors note that could be down to the nature of the questions.
“Our results show that about 10% of authoritarianism – ie how people vary in this regard – could be explained by their body odour disgust sensitivity,” explained Olofsson. About 2% of Trump support could be explained by how disgusted people were by the thought of body odours, he said.
I see authoritarianism as related cognitively to taking action when irritated. It is different in my mind from other, more philosophical aspects of conservatism like a perception that others should not interfere in your actions, if you are not intruding on others, or the philosophical idea that being armed and able to defend oneself is a fundamental right, or the intellectual aspects of understanding the economic benefits to conservatism, and so on.
Although all may be related to amygdala, they may relate to different amygdala-functions, like relevance weighing, flagging salience, focusing attention, driving aversion, driving action, and so on.
I think the perception of a bad smell is related to the immediate urge to flee it, and thus may relate more to the drive to action – and the related drive to get control over everyone around you which is inherent to what they call authoritarianism. In a way, the leftist traitor is analogous to a bad smell in the air, only instead of getting away from them you want them to get away from you and your people, or at least make them be patriotic. I am not sure I can liken the idea of gun ownership views, or opinions on national defense to that cognitive style of function.
So as times goes on, things we say here are all due to amygdala probably are, but they may be able to be divided up into different aspects of amygdala-function.
I do not know if this will eventually have bearing on how an understanding of r/K will affect persuasion, but I suspect it will, as you will be able to use arguments relating to these base amygdala functions to prime the brain to agree with the aspect of conservatism you are presenting. But that must come later.
For now, recognize that there will be differences we will have to unravel.
It’s simpler. Conservatives have a working disgust factor, liberals don’t.
That’s why they always end up pissing in a bottle and throwing it at their enemies, and conservatives wouldn’t even think of that, much less do it.
The human sense of smell is not as developed as our visual, but it makes us respond on a more subconscious level. We we respond to pheromones that are barely noticeable. We also respond to differences in racial odors. And not just Whites. The Japanese used to consider the odor of Europeans to resemble rancid butter.
Sensetivity to foul smells found as more common amoung Trump voters actaully makes sense.
It comes down to several things that all wind together like a twisted rope.
1. Generally foul smells are associated with things that can do us harm. Our ancient selves may not have known why it was bad to drink foul smelling or tasting water, but today we can see that fecal matter is a carrier of disease and water contamination is a problem.
2. Generally conservatives/Trump voters are more likely to be orderly. That is they prefer things set in a way. It goes to the idea again of being clean, because we’ve noticed that dirt can kill you – again back to bacteria. Heck for all of our primate fear of lions, more humans have been killed by bacteria/virus and they are represented by dirt- and actually are in dirt. Smells that are foul convey the sense of dirty.
I’m not sure I’m up to the amygdala fuctions yet, except to note that K’s do things to keep themselves and their off spring alive. So avoiding foul smells – avoid things that can harm the self.
That said, again we have a behavior (avoidance) that is used by both r and K, BUT for different reasons.
I see the fundamental difference between r’s and K’s as a difference on the value of responsiblity, especially personal responsiblity. r’s have low scores, K’s have higher scores. This coudl be related to teh OCEAN/CANOE personality tests, and the C which is concienciousness. Perhaps the O which is openness, but for a responsiblity, I think that is the C.
Think about the mechanism, think about the person smelling.
If they aren’t bathing often, are they wiping often? Are they doing other stuff often? Are they more likely or less likely than some other random person (who doesn’t smell) to be a disease vector?
Now you see why the reflex developed in humans, it is instinct.
interestingly Karl Marx was a disgusting, filthy pig who never bathed and was covered with sores because of this uncleanness. whenever i am around someone disgusting, often they are liberal or at least very r and i have this desire to kill them. perhaps this is natures way of making k’s get rid of r’s before they do too much damage. in many left wing places such as NYC, filth is glorified and tolerated, often said to be part of the local color. they make their immediate environment so disgusting to k’s that we leave them to their devices and do not stay around long enough to challenge them. i also notice that rather conservative towns and cities tend to strike me as very clean and orderly. funny how adaptive the whole thing appears.
Do you think these nibbas stink?
http://img.4plebs.org/boards/pol/image/1474/28/1474284290557.webm
NSFW
My favorite cannibal!
Seeing that guy take a bite out of that leg was so much worse than the pictures.
OT:
http://img.4plebs.org/boards/pol/image/1482/73/1482738887028.png
How Hitler took Germany economy out of the jew bankers control.
OT:
Never give money to anyone that asks for it (charity related):
http://img.4plebs.org/boards/pol/image/1514/79/1514799853870.png
Another god-tier OT redpill:
http://img.4plebs.org/boards/pol/image/1432/25/1432250971171.png
The error of USA allowing jews, blacks and welfare to become a thing on USA.
The “authoritarian” stuff is almost certainly lingering from the discredited earlier study, which has since been retracted because it was exactly backwards. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ajps.12216/epdf