Your brain’s response to disturbing images can reveal your politics

Your brain’s yuck factor response is a strong predictor of political beliefs.
That’s according to a team of international researchers led by Read Montague, a professor at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute.
Montague presented test subjects with repulsive images of dirty toilets, mutilated dead bodies and the like. After observing their brain reactions through functional magnetic resonance imaging, the scientists gave them a political questionnaire.
But here’s the creepy part: brain reactions to disturbing images could predict a person’s political bent with 95 to 98 percent accuracy.
“Remarkably,” Montague said in a news release, “we found that the brain’s response to a single disgusting image was enough to predict an individual’s political ideology.”
The yuck factor seems to be more powerful among conservatives, but why, Montague said, remains to be determined.
So before heading to the polls on Tuesday, get out of your Halloween threads and put on your thinking cap.
“If we can begin to understand that some automatic reactions to political issues may be simply that — reactions,” said Montague, “then we might take the temperature down a bit in the current boiler of political discourse.”
The study will be published in Current Biology.