Pathogen disgust requires no defense: a response to Shook, Terrizzi, Clay, & Oosterhoff (2015)

Abstract

STCO criticize our analytic strategy onmultiple fronts. First, they object to ourmodeling of error covariances between endogenous ideology variables in path analyses. Failing to model error covariances assumes that conservatism measures are completely uncorrelated, except to the extent to which they are related to model predictors. As STCO demonstrate, models of this assumption fit the data poorly. The fit of such models is irrelevant to the theory being tested in our article or STCO's response, though—it merely demonstrates that, say, social conservatism correlates with agreement with the Republican Party. Second, after previously objecting to usingmeasures that blend economic and social conservatism (Terrizzi, Shook, & McDaniel, 2013), STCO curiously criticize us for not blending our diverse conservatism measures into a single latent variable. STCO's proposalwill be difficult to evaluate empirically if it can neither be tested by treating social and economic conservatism separately nor by averaging across social and economic conservatism. Finally, STCO object to our use of the routine practice of interpreting model fit statistics for theory testing; this criticism is especially peculiar given STCO later employee these same fit statistics in their analyses. On the whole, STCO's statistical critiques do not warrant change to our conclusions. Nevertheless, to satisfy STCO's concerns regarding path models, we reanalyzed every relationship reported in our paper using the simplest mediation model possible. Using SPSS's PROCESS macro, we tested direct and indirect effects of pathogen avoidance on conservatism, mediated by sexual strategies. Across every measure in all three studies, we observe no direct relationship between pathogen avoidance and conservatism, though pathogen avoidance does consistently relate to conservatism indirectly via sexual strategies (see Table 1 for effects for “social” conservatism variables). Since publishing our paper, we have included the TDDS and the item “Howwould you describe your political orientation when it comes to social issues” in two studies (N's = 347 and 490) using Mechanical Turk participants, the same group sampled in our manuscript and in STCO's commentary. In both data sets, we observe an indirect relationship of pathogen disgust on social conservatism via sexual disgust, but no direct relationship between pathogen disgust and social conservatism (see Table 1). In sum, across five large samples, we find that sexual disgust fully mediates any relationship between pathogen disgust and social conservatism. Even so, do thesemeasures offer a fair test of the theories we and STCO describe?