Abstract
Authoritarianism has resurfaced as a research topic in political psychology, as it appears relevant to explain current political trends. Authoritarian attitudes have been consistently linked to feelings of disgust, an emotion that is thought to have evolved to protect the organism from contamination. We hypothesized that body odour disgust sensitivity (BODS) might be associated with authoritarianism, as chemo-signalling is a primitive system for regulating interpersonal contact and disease avoidance, which are key features also in authoritarianism. We used well-validated scales for measuring BODS, authoritarianism and related constructs. Across two studies, we found that BODS is positively related to authoritarianism. In a third study, we showed a positive association between BODS scores and support for Donald Trump, who, at the time of data collection, was a presidential candidate with an agenda described as resonating with authoritarian attitudes. Authoritarianism fully explained the positive association between BODS and support for Donald Trump. Our findings highlight body odour disgust as a new and promising domain in political psychology research. Authoritarianism and BODS might be part of the same disease avoidance framework, and our results contribute to the growing evidence that contemporary social attitudes might be rooted in basic sensory functions.
Highlights
Authoritarianism has resurfaced as a research topic in political psychology, as it appears relevant to explain current political trends
Consistent with our predictions, we found very strong evidence in favour of the hypothesis that Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) correlates with pathogen-related disgust (TDDS-pat, Pearson’s r = 0.32, BF10 = 4620) and olfactory body odour disgust (Pearson’s r = 0.39, BF10 = 995 802; see zero-order correlations in table 1 and figure 1)
The behavioural immune system’ (BIS) framework assumes a relationship between pathogen avoidance motives and an orientation towards authoritarianism and social dominance [24], the role played by body odours has been largely overlooked [39]
Summary
Authoritarianism has resurfaced as a research topic in political psychology, as it appears relevant to explain current political trends. We hypothesized that body odour disgust sensitivity (BODS) might be associated with authoritarianism, as chemo-signalling is a primitive system for regulating interpersonal contact and disease avoidance, which are key features in authoritarianism. We showed a positive association between BODS scores and support for Donald Trump, who, at the time of data collection, was a presidential candidate with an agenda described as resonating with authoritarian attitudes. Authoritarianism fully explained the positive association between BODS and support for Donald Trump. Recent findings have suggested that human behaviour is governed by a ‘behavioural immune system’ (BIS) [1,2], a set of psychological mechanisms that presumably evolved in order to (i) detect cues of pathogen threats to health and survival, (ii) activate the appropriate affective and cognitive responses to such threats and (iii) trigger the relevant avoidance behaviours [3]. Faulkner et al [10] found that higher levels of pathogen salience and perceived vulnerability to disease (PVD) [11] predicted negative attitudes towards unfamiliar outgroups
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