Bathroom references in anti- HERO campaign tap into deep seated differences between liberals and conservaties

A Houston Chronicle commentator makes the following - correct - observation about the use of bathroom references in the campaign against the ordinance which would protect people in Houston from discrimination in employment and housing among other things based on a host of items including sexual orientation (being gay or trans gendered).

- Click here for the article.

A personal question today: How do you feel about public restrooms?

Do you see them as useful facilities whose benefits far outweigh the occasional untidiness?

Or, are you so disgusted by public restrooms that you avoid them at all costs, entering only in the case of an emergency, and then, only with pinched nose and value-sized pump of anti-bacterial lotion?

Your answer may reveal something about your politics, according to Jonathan Haidt, a moral psychologist at New York University's Stern School of Business. The more grossed out you are by public restrooms, the more conservative you are likely to be - and vice versa.

This is why bathrooms are the perfect tool for social conservatives trying to defeat Houston's equal rights ordinance.

The author touches on recent research that suggests that a person's ideological outlook may be genetic - or if not - based on deep seated emotional responses to the outside world.

- From Newsweek:

Conservatives and liberals really are wired differently. Scientists can accurately predict whether a subject is left-wing tree-hugger or a right-wing gun-toter based on how their brains respond to certain images, a new study in Current Biology has found.

P. Read Montague, a scientist at Virginia Tech, said his experiment was inspired by data that shows political affiliation, like height, can be inherited. "I the same sense that height is highly genetically specified, it's also true that it's not predetermined by genetics; nutrition, sleep, starvation, dramatic physical injury, and so on can serve to change one's ultimate height. However, tall people have tall children, and this is a kind of starting point [for the experiement]," he said.

Montague and his colleagues asked subjects to look at positive, negative, and disgusting images and examined functional magnetic resonance images (fMRI) of their brains. His team found that conservatives' and liberals' brains behave differently when confronted with disgusting imagery. "Disgusting images, and the mutilated body of an animal especially, generated neural responses that were highly predictive of political orientation. That was true even though the neural predictors didn't necessarily agree with participants' conscious rating of those disturbing pictures," the authors of the study said.

The test proved surprisingly accurate. "A single disgusting image was sufficient to predict each subject's political orientation," Montague said. "I haven't seen such clean predictive results in any other functional imaging experiments in our lab or others."

But wait! There's more:

- Liberal or conservative? Brain responses to disgusting images help reveal political leanings.
- Disgust Sensitivity, Political Conservatism, and Voting.
- Liberal or conservative? Reactions to disgust are a dead giveaway.