The poor bunny had a terminal infection. My college roommate was too broke to bring it to the vet. So, she asked her boyfriend to help.

“Nay,” said he.

She asked the other roommates.

“Nay,” said they.

I walked in the door home from school into an apparently Victorian English abode and said, “Sure. It’s but a simple wound, good madame.”

Can Our Level of Disgust Predict Our Politics?

One of those roommates had a lifelong aversion towards cucumbers. As a cat would yeet and flee across the room when surprised with a cucumber behind him (they think it’s a snake), my roommate would scraunch in horror at finding a piece of the harmless, tasteless, odorless vegetable at the bottom of a salad.

I know that last fact because of a prank we pulled days after finding out his worst food fear. Boys will be dicks, as they say.

That former roommate has been a life-long staunch conservative of the less extreme Canadian variety.

It All Begins With a Metric

Genetic predisposition towards personality traits is a dangerous topic. We probably have the complete absence of morals in WWII prison medical camps (both German and Japanese) to thank for that.

But here we go anyway.

A man by the name of David Pizarro studies the science of “disgust.” It’s a simple idea with an incredibly rich depth to it. What brought me across his path recently was his TED talk on the idea of associating levels of disgust with who we would vote for.

Sounds like nonsense, right?

Well, nothing a good rabbit hole can’t help figure out.

The Science of Disgust

When Jonathan Haidt, Clark McCauley, and Paul Rozin got together in 1994, they set out to make something a bit funky. They wanted to create a systematic scale to measure the amount of general disgust a person perceives in everyday life.

While a homeless man peeing in your morning brew might be someone’s cup of tea, it’s probably not everyone’s.

A cat’s brown starfish being exposed on a TikTok video is repulsive enough for some videographers to replace it with a floating cartoon butterfly sticker. Or worse.

One person’s pukish cucumber is another person’s repulsive beetroot—AKA the most disgusting thing to ever come out of the ground since Twilight’s character origins.

It was later termed the “Disgust Scale,” fostering further studies into the idea. The scale has since been improved and the recommended version is now creatively called—the “Disgust Scale-Revised”.

Who says scientists aren’t marketing geniuses?

The creation of this scale has since been used in a variety of fascinating studies. One of them, in particular, caught my eye.

Several researchers got together and used fMRI studies to test the idea that rating a person’s level of disgust—after being exposed to certain lovely images—could estimate their political leanings.

They might’ve pursued this as the idea had been floating around for at least a decade, with some studies pointing out the