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ObjectivesSensitivity to disgust predicts social attitudes, but this relationship can shift depending on gender and whether response to disgust is measured through surveys or physiological tests. We are interested in exploring the relationship between gender, political preferences, and different measures of disgust.MethodsWe systematically evaluate these interrelationships by comparing self‐reported disgust sensitivity and changes in skin conductance while viewing disgusting images, accounting for gender and attitudes toward gay marriage.ResultsWe find that although there is no physiological difference between genders, opponents of gay marriage conform to gender‐role expectations in self‐reports, with women reporting higher levels of disgust than males. For males, physiological response better predicts attitudes on gay marriage because there are physiological, but not self‐reported, differences between supporters and opponents. Self‐report and physiology both predict gay marriage attitudes for females.ConclusionOur findings suggest that combining traditional survey and physiological measures provides leverage in exploring questions related to social behaviors and their origins.

AbstractIf many consider the United States to be a Christian nation, how does this affect individuals who are American citizens but not Christian? We test two major hypotheses: (1) Americans consider Christians to be more fully American than non-Christians. We examine whether Americans explicitly and implicitly connect being Christian with being a true American; and (2) Christian Americans are more likely to be patriotic and set exclusive boundaries on the national group than non-Christian Americans. Among non-Christians, however, those who want to be fully accepted as American will be more patriotic and set more exclusive boundaries to emulate prototypical Americans than non-Christians who place less emphasis on national group membership. We test these hypotheses using data from a survey and from an Implicit Association Test. We find that Americans in general associate being Christian with being a true American. For Christians, this is true both explicitly and implicitly. For non-Christians, only the implicit measure uncovers an association. We also found that non-Christians exhibit significantly more pro-national group behaviors when they desire being prototypical than when they do not.

Political involvement varies markedly across people. Traditional explanations for this variation tend to rely on demographic variables and self-reported, overtly political concepts. In this article, we expand the range of possible explanatory variables by hypothesizing that a correlation exists between political involvement and physiological predispositions. We measure physiology by computing the degree to which electrodermal activity changes on average when a participant sequentially views a full range of differentially valenced stimuli. Our findings indicate that individuals with higher electrodermal responsiveness are also more likely to participate actively in politics. This relationship holds even after the effects of traditional demographic variables are taken into account, suggesting that physiological responsiveness independently contributes to a fuller understanding of the underlying sources of variation in political involvement. Adapted from the source document.

We report evidence that individual-level variation in people's physiological and attentional responses to aversive and appetitive stimuli are correlated with broad political orientations. Specifically, we find that greater orientation to aversive stimuli tends to be associated with right-of-centre and greater orientation to appetitive (pleasing) stimuli with left-of-centre political inclinations. These findings are consistent with recent evidence that political views are connected to physiological predispositions but are unique in incorporating findings on variation in directed attention that make it possible to understand additional aspects of the link between the physiological and the political.