Abstract
Political scientists have increasingly looked to the role that disgust plays in shaping public opinion and attitudes. This emotion plays an important role in building and reinforcing boundaries in the polity. It is particularly important in shaping attitudes toward gay rights. We analyze data from the 1993 American National Election Studies (ANES) data and two original studies. We find that disgust is a powerful but contingent rhetorical tool. It can powerfully shape public attitudes, especially on issues of sexual purity, but that efficacy must come with a strong caveat: our findings show that some members of the public will reject disgust rhetoric as an indignant reaction against the speaker.
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Notes
We focus on emotional appeals in the form of disgusting political rhetoric because, in the political world, discourse must be used to shape attitudes. Lab studies that create disgust through unclean rooms and fart spray show a strong connection between disgust and attitudes, but the political world does not easily mimic the laboratory. Elites rarely use physically disgusting stimuli to influence attitudes, instead relying on language and imagery. A speaker creatively employing physically disgusting stimuli as part of their message is unlikely to find an attentive or receptive audience.
Our data do not speak to this last conjecture, but recent research suggests that this is an important factor to consider in future research on the politics of disgust (Casey 2016).
Data and replication code for the analyses is available at https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/WYTRZC.
This is the only wave of the ANES that includes both gay rights questions and disgust questions that are unconnected from candidate evaluations. Disgust originates from a need to protect against toxic substances and groups, and we expect that the political reaction is to support policies that will most effectively protect the polity from the perceived source of disgust. People who are disgusted by Bill Clinton and people disgusted by homosexuality should support very different types of policies to avoid being “contaminated” by the objects of disgust. Political elites who draw on disgust imagery to oppose gay rights policies use homosexuality as their target, as the ANES questions do.
Disgust is measured in the 1993 wave of the ANES.
We combine four questions asked in the 1992 wave of the ANES into a “moral traditionalism” index. People were asked: 1. whether people should be more tolerant of those who live by their own moral standards, 2. if the country would have fewer problems if there was more emphasis on traditional family ties, 3. if newer lifestyles contribute to the breakdown of society, and 4. if it world is always changing and we should adjust our view of morality to changing times. We combine these into an index (Cronbach’s alpha = 0.65) rescaled from 0 to 1 so that higher values indicate more support for traditional morality.
These tests were calculated using the postestimation “test” command in Stata.
For example, in the 2012 ANES, 61 percent of respondents supported adoption rights for gays and lesbians, almost doubling support over the 1993 wave. Support for allowing gays to serve in the military similarly increased from 55 percent support in 1992 to 86 percent in 2012.
This part of the study was part of a larger study of emotions that included an additional two conditions that are not analyzed here. The larger sample has 659 respondents.
There were two additional conditions where respondents were asked to feel empathy or anger designed for a different purpose that will not be analyzed here.
Disgust research typically involves two approaches to eliciting disgust in respondents. One method is to expose respondents to a variety of physically disgusting stimuli. Examples of these kinds of treatments include exposure to bad smells such as ‘fart gas’, asking respondents to complete tasks in unclean environments, displaying disgusting videos, and asking respondents to recall physically disgusting experiences (Schnall et al. 2008). Variations on this use a combination of photographs of disgusting behaviors and implicit moral violations to elicit disgust responses, such as a photograph of a man eating a handful of worms (Smith et al. 2011). Alternatively, disgust researchers use techniques such as asking respondents to express judgments on a variety of moral transgressions, ranging from the trivial to the severe, usually presented as vignettes (Chapman and Anderson 2013). Study 1 varies this second technique by simply asking respondents to focus on what makes them feel disgusted.
The disgust prompt read: We’re interested in how people react to different groups. There’s been a great deal of attention lately to gays and lesbians. Please describe something about gays and lesbians that made you feel DISGUSTED. Please describe how you felt as vividly and in as much detail as possible. Think about the way the issues are talked about, recent court cases, and real world events. Examples of things that have made some people feel DISGUST are statements made on the media, things said during political debates and campaigns, or how everyday people discuss gays and lesbians. It is okay if you don’t remember all the details, just be specific about what exactly it was that made you feel DISGUST and what it felt like to be DISGUSTED. Take a few minutes to write out your answer.
The control prompt read: We’re interested in how people react to different groups. There’s been a great deal of attention lately to gays and lesbians. Please describe something that comes to mind when you think about gays and lesbians. Think about the way the issues are talked about, recent court cases, and real world events. Examples of things that may come to mind are statements made on the media, things said during political debates and campaigns, or how everyday people discuss gays and lesbians. It is okay if you don’t remember all the details, just be specific about what exactly it was that comes to mind. Take a few minutes to write out your answer.
Across all models, demographics are scaled to vary between 0 and 1 with higher values indicating Republican (a 7-point scale), conservative (a 7-point scale), more traditional morality (see question wordings in the ANES section) (16-point scale) and disgust sensitivity (16-point scale). Age is measured in years and varies between 18 and 76 in Study 1. Gender and sexual orientation are dummy variables with 1 equal to identifying as female and heterosexual. Disgust treatment is the effect of being assigned to the disgust treatment (coded as 1) compared to the neutral condition (coded as 0).
We combine “disgusted” and “sickened” together into an index (Cronbach’s alpha = 0.88).
We measure respondents’ sensitivity to disgust prior to exposure to the treatment using the DS-R scale, which includes multiple measures of comfort with objects like dead bodies or maggots (Olatunji et al. 2007).
These questions were asked prior to the Supreme Court’s decision legalizing same-sex marriage nationwide in 2015.
We include anger only in the second stage model that predicts opinion as a function of emotions and the treatment. Including anger as a predictor of disgust would imply that anger was a cause of disgust and would thus be a post-treatment confounder, which would violate the sequential ignorability assumption that underlies these mediation models.
It is not the case that it is different people become angry and disgusted; these emotions correlated at 0.67 (p < 0.01). Yet, the effects of these emotions are countervailing.
One alternative mechanism is that anger is an indicator of empathy here, but we do not have the requisite measure of empathy to test this mechanism.
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Acknowledgements
The authors are listed in alphabetical order. We would like to thank Aaron Hoffman, Seth Jolly, Dan McDowell, Spencer Piston, Josh Thompson, participants at Purdue University, the Moynihan Research Workshop, and the Midwest Political Science Association 2014 annual meeting for feedback on earlier versions of this paper. We also owe thanks to the editor and the anonymous reviewers for their feedback and subsequent improvements to the paper. Finally, we thank the Department of Political Science and the Maxwell School at Syracuse University for their support of this project.
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Gadarian, S.K., van der Vort, E. The Gag Reflex: Disgust Rhetoric and Gay Rights in American Politics. Polit Behav 40, 521–543 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-017-9412-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-017-9412-x