Polit Behav (2018) 40:521–543

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-017-9412-x

ORIGINAL PAPER

The Gag Reflex: Disgust Rhetoric and Gay Rights

in American Politics

Shana Kushner Gadarian1 • Eric van der Vort1

Published online: 8 June 2017

 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2017

Abstract Political scientists have increasingly looked to the role that disgust plays
in shaping public opinion and attitudes. This emotion plays an important role in
building and reinforcing boundaries in the polity. It is particularly important in
shaping attitudes toward gay rights. We analyze data from the 1993 American
National Election Studies (ANES) data and two original studies. We find that dis-
gust is a powerful but contingent rhetorical tool. It can powerfully shape public
attitudes, especially on issues of sexual purity, but that efficacy must come with a
strong caveat: our findings show that some members of the public will reject disgust
rhetoric as an indignant reaction against the speaker.

Keywords Disgust  Emotion  Gay rights  Rhetoric

Introduction

The politics of disgust is alive and well. In 2013, future Secretary of Housing and
Urban Development Dr. Ben Carson compared homosexuality to pedophilia and
bestiality, saying: ‘‘[marriage is] a well-established, fundamental pillar of society
and no group, be they gays, be they NAMBLA, be they people who believe in
bestiality—it doesn’t matter what they are, they don’t get to change the definition’’

Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s11109-017-9412-

x) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

& Eric van der Vort

emvander@syr.edu
1
Department of Political Science, Maxwell School, Syracuse University, 100 Eggers Hall,
Syracuse, NY 13244, USA

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(Ayres-Deets 2013). While Carson later apologized for his comments, the continued
use of such language sometimes surprises modern ears, who are more accustomed to
hearing arguments emphasizing the normalcy of lesbians and gays. These arguments
helped create a more inclusive society (Flores and Barclay 2015). But for some
portions of the population, it seems that disgusting language is a powerful emotional
counterargument to pro-inclusive messages, one that lesbian and gay advocates have
difficulty countering (Schilt and Westbrook 2015). How do those parts of the
population react to language like Carson’s? How do messages that emphasize
deviance and perversion manage to be so effective for some Americans and yet
provoke an opposite reaction in others? We argue that disgust is a contingent
political tool, the use of which comes with no small risk of provoking backlash.
Disgust may remain a powerful tool for shifting political attitudes, but not always
in the way that elites intend (Clifford et al. 2015; Kam and Estes 2016). We argue
that this contingency is rooted in how messaging and rhetoric have evolved in
response to the public’s increasing acceptance of lesbians and gays (Harrison and
Michelson 2012). Our politics has shifted enough that the mere existence of lesbians
and gays no longer prompts condemnation from broad parts of the population.
Lesbians and gays are now among the most effective advocates for their own rights,
through personal contact and persuasion (Herek and Capitanio 1996; Broockman
and Kalla 2016; Harrison and Michelson 2017). Contact theory argues that those
who personally know lesbians or gays are more likely to hold inclusive attitudes.
Yet research also suggests that lesbians and gay remain widely stigmatized, in part
because of disgust (Herek and McLemore 2013).
Like other emotions, disgust is politically relevant. At its evolutionary core, it
alerts individuals to the presence of toxicity and noxiousness in the world. It helps
individuals to avoid toxic substances, thus maintaining cleanliness and relative
safety (Cosmides and Tooby 2000). Its connection in maintaining physical purity is
mirrored in the ways it helps to enforce and maintain various forms of social purity
(Douglas 2003). The particular forms of purity enforced vary by culture, but it is a
critical element in drawing and sustaining social and political barriers (Haidt et al.
1997). Disgust is a powerful predictor of moral and political judgments, particularly
as they relate to lesbians and gays (Inbar et al. 2009; Inbar et al. 2012; Inbar and
Pizarro 2014). Further, the increased openness of lesbians and gays may even
increase the relevance of disgust for some Americans (Casey 2016). In their study of
disgust, Kam and Estes (2016) quote writer Upton Sinclair, ‘‘I aimed at the public’s
heart and by accident I hit it in the stomach.’’ We argue that, sometimes, elites may
aim at the public’s stomach and find that they hit it in the heart or the head instead.
By this, we mean that there is a contingency to disgust’s ability to shape political
attitudes and its perils and limits as a rhetorical strategy. Elites can attempt to use
disgust to drive politics. Disgusting language and imagery are used to communicate
stigma in the hopes of shaping public attitudes and policy (Smith 2007; Nussbaum
2010; Hatemi and McDermott 2012; Kam and Estes 2016). We argue that rhetoric
like Carson’s represents an appeal to what Martha Nussbaum calls projective
disgust. Projective disgust is a kind of ‘‘sympathetic magic’’ that involves ‘‘linking
the allegedly disgusting group or person somehow with the primary objects of
disgust’’ (Nussbaum 2010). ‘‘Practical connections’’ may exist between the object

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and the target, but usually ‘‘the extension works in more fantasy-laden ways, by
imputing to… groups properties similar to those that are found disgusting in the
primary objects: bad smell, ooziness, rottenness, germiness, decay. Typically, these
projections have no basis in reality’’ (Nussbaum 2010). We call the political use of
disgusting language, which invokes these projections, disgust rhetoric (Kam and
Estes 2016).
In the United States, many groups have been portrayed as threatening the polity,
including ‘‘sexually deviant’’ ones (Morone 2004). It has historically been easy to
use disgust to depict sexual minorities in this light (Horberg et al. 2009; Herman
1996; Canaday 2009). This supposed deviance remains a theme in modern political
discourse. Anita Bryant, a prominent anti-gay activist in the 1970s, asserted that
‘‘…if [children] are exposed to homosexuality, I might as well feed them garbage’’
(Eskridge 2008, Emphasis added). In 2014, Pat Robertson argued, ‘‘Nobody can
ever produce a child through homosexual sex or lesbian sex—you cannot do it. This
is for procreation and God has said that those who violate it, the land will vomit
them out’’ (Wong 2015, Emphasis added). Robertson shows that disgusting rhetoric
is not a relic of the past; it remains a tool used to stigmatize lesbians and gays.
Disgust influences political attitudes by increasing negative affect toward some
groups and by lowering support for policies that benefit the targeted group. This
emotion is powerful enough to transcend partisan cues that would normally drive
political attitudes (Clifford and Wendell 2015). It tends to lead to disapproval of
lesbians and gays and a preference for exclusive policies (Terrizzi et al. 2010). It
can alter implicit and explicit support for lesbian and gay rights, whether through
induction, social exposure, or overt disgust stimuli (Inbar et al. 2012; Cunningham
et al. 2013; Casey 2016). There are clear connections between felt disgust and
political attitudes. We know that language and rhetoric are critical in shaping
perceptions of groups in the mass public, and that emotional language is part of this
process (Schneider and Ingram 1993; Smith 2007; Albertson and Gadarian 2015).
The ways in which disgusting rhetoric actually works in politics are less clear. In
particular, we know little about the ability of political elites to effectively marshal
disgust among the mass public or what its consequences might be.
Disgust plays a role in shaping attitudes and policies towards lesbians and gays.
Public opinion toward lesbians and gays has shifted rapidly and substantially toward
greater inclusion. In this context, should we expect that disgust rhetoric works as it
has in the past? We argue that the answer to this question is no—but also yes.
Disgust is simply no longer as relevant or as powerful as it once was. We also
believe that disgust remains a powerful force among some portions of the
population, making it an effective rhetorical strategy among that populace. There is
also reason to believe it may work more broadly: some research suggests that public
opposition to lesbian and gay rights may be higher than usually reported (Coffman
et al. 2016). The ability to move even a small segment of an otherwise polarized
population can make the use of disgust rhetoric an attractive option for elites
(Hillygus and Shields 2009). We expand on existing research about disgust’s
relevance for political attitudes by asking how disgust influences these attitudes in
an era of increasing acceptance. In the following section, we describe our theory of
how disgust rhetoric influences attitudes about gay rights.

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Theory and Hypotheses

Highly passionate political debates provide elites the opportunity to use emotional
language to appeal to the mass public (Holbrook and O’Shaughnessy 1984;
Vakratsas and Ambler 1999). We focus on disgust rhetoric, defined as the political
use of projective disgust in a message intended to communicate stigma and
uncleanness in relation to social groups (Smith et al. 2011).1 It encourages social
judgments intended to keep individuals and society safe and clean, which may lead
to avoiding and sanctioning others seen to pose the threat of contamination, and to
the endorsement of policies seen as protective. It stigmatizes populations deemed
outside of a society’s conventional boundaries (Douglas 2003). It allows elites to
signal that the ‘‘bounds of toleration are being reached’’ and may help convince
citizens that a group’s threat is ‘‘weighty enough to deprive’’ said group of freedoms
(Devlin 1965, p. 17).
We expect that disgust will be especially potent in negatively influencing
attitudes about gays and lesbians. However, we do not expect disgust rhetoric to be
universally effective. Changing attitudes have fundamentally altered the terms on
which lesbians and gays are discussed. As issues have shifted over time (Brewer
2007), we believe that disgust is less effective for lesbians and gays as a broad
category and disgust rhetoric simply may not work as intended. This is one reason
that using emotional rhetoric in politics is a risky prospect. Emotional rhetoric may
provoke the intended reaction—but it could also backfire. Elites using disgust
rhetoric to achieve their political goals should be attentive to the threat of backlash
as citizens hear and possibly reject their messages (Brehm 1966; Brehm and Brehm
1981; Mann 2010). This is particularly true since disgust objects are not fixed—old
language can produce new results. The particular domains of disgust are stable, but
how they apply varies significantly by culture (Haidt et al. 1997, Rozin and Haidt
2013). We contend that it is possible that disgust objects can vary over time within a
culture. Social and moral disgust in particular are subject to social construction,
which may change over time through experience or learning (Olatunji and Sawchuk
2005). Disgust is an emotion that signals the need for avoidance, but large numbers
of Americans no longer consider lesbians and gays a group to be avoided.
Trends in disgust research support this assertion about the change in the
emotional substrates of attitudes towards lesbians and gays over time. Herek (1984)
found that disgust is one contributing factor toward anti-gay attitudes, consistent
with later psychological research. A study of college students in 1989 asked them
about attitudes toward homosexuality, including feelings of disgust when asked
about public displays of affection between same-sex couples (Geller 1991). These
students then went through several months of coursework on sexuality and
completed a survey at the end. This study found no significant reduction in reports

1
We focus on emotional appeals in the form of disgusting political rhetoric because, in the political
world, discourse must be used to shape attitudes. Lab studies that create disgust through unclean rooms
and fart spray show a strong connection between disgust and attitudes, but the political world does not
easily mimic the laboratory. Elites rarely use physically disgusting stimuli to influence attitudes, instead
relying on language and imagery. A speaker creatively employing physically disgusting stimuli as part of
their message is unlikely to find an attentive or receptive audience.

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of feeling disgusted by the idea of public displays of affection. By comparison, a

2016 Harris poll shows that the numbers of Americans feeling such discomfort has
greatly diminished over time. While asking different questions, the number of
Americans who report being very or somewhat uncomfortable seeming same-sex
couples holding hands in 2014 were 36 and 29% in 2015 (GLAAD 2016). This is a
large reduction compared to the 1989 study.
These social changes have consequences for the politics of disgust (Hodson and
Costello 2007). Efforts to break down those barriers and increase intergroup contact
might reduce disgust’s efficacy not by lowering individual disgust sensitivity or
making the emotion less prevalent but rather by changing disgust’s salience in
evaluating particular groups. Personal contact, persuasion, and media effects have
all combined to shift the emotional substrates of attitudes towards lesbians and gays
in a way that we argue made disgust less relevant for at least some portions of the
population (Herek 1990; Brewer 2007; Smith et al. 2009; Garretson 2015;
Broockman and Kalla 2016; Harrison and Michelson 2017). Other portions may
more actively seek to disguise their attitudes. The cumulative effects of these efforts
may not simply make disgust less relevant and individual preferences more
inclusive, but may also cause some Americans to react to disgust appeals with
indignation.
Indignation can be expressed as a negative reaction directed against a speaker on
behalf of the targeted population when people attempt to communicate disgust and
moral stigma through rhetoric. Reactions against overt racism are sometimes
expressed this way (Cowan and Hodge 1996; Uhlmann et al. 2014). We believe that
the affective politics of sexuality have shifted in the face of cultural and social
change, as the politics of race and racism did before them. This change involves a
fundamental revision in the role of disgust in informing these attitudes. For some
Americans, particularly those who endorse more traditional social arrangements,
disgust will remain a powerful predictor of opposition to lesbian and gay rights. For
others, more open to lesbian and gay rights, disgust may be directed toward elites
who oppose those rights in the form of indignation. And some Americans may find
themselves newly disgusted by the increased prevalence of lesbians and gays in
American society (Casey 2016).2 Given the potential for anti-egalitarian backlash
(Klarman 2004, 2012; Abrajano and Hajnal 2015; Bishin et al. 2016), we believe
that pro-egalitarian backlash also exists. We argue that this pro-egalitarian backlash
can take the form of indignation. This ‘new’ politics of disgust is what makes a
powerful political emotion simultaneously a dangerous one: Americans may punish
speakers for attempting to communicate stigma about lesbians and gays.
Indignation is an altruistic punishment fueled by anger (Sunstein and Kahneman
2007). Anger frequently co-occurs with disgust. Some respondents even seem to
respond to disgust stimuli with no substantive expressions of disgust but instead
with much stronger expressions of anger (Chapman and Anderson 2013). Appraisal
theories of emotion argue that specific emotional reactions depend on how
individuals understand and explain their experiences (Smith and Ellsworth 1985).

2
Our data do not speak to this last conjecture, but recent research suggests that this is an important factor
to consider in future research on the politics of disgust (Casey 2016).

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While disgust is a prominent emotion associated with gay men in particular (Tapias
et al. 2007), to the extent that respondents who support rights hear a message about
gay rights that relies on disgust, (e.g. an anti-rights activist using disgusting
language), they may see the messenger as blocking a desired goal and become
angry. Anger can lead to an indignant altruistic punishment of offenders (Sunstein
and Kahneman 2007), and supporting rights that are opposite of the ones advocated
by anti-rights groups may be one way to ‘‘punish’’ in this situation. In the absence of
barriers enforced by disgust, anger may become a viable alternative to disgust for
those who would continue to enforce previous social barriers (Feldman and Huddy
2005; Nussbaum 2010; Banks and Valentino 2012; Banks 2014). In racial politics,
old-fashioned racism is affectively linked to disgust and has become stigmatized. As
a result, opponents of civil rights rearticulated their arguments in ways that centered
on anger and outrage (Banks 2014). We do not believe this explanation applies to
the politics of sexuality in the United States.
Rather, we suspect that disgust toward lesbians and gays has not yet been
subsumed by other emotional substrates and translated into a fully differentiated
rhetoric. This means that attempts to deploy disgust rhetoric are in a transitional
state. As the examples we cite show, they rely on a set of tropes about lesbians and
gays rejected by many but not all in the mass public. Disgust is a less relevant
framing device, but not an irrelevant one. This means it is likely to be deployed but
that, once deployed, may provoke anger among a mass public that is pushed too
hard to stigmatize a group they have come to accept or no longer wish to stigmatize.
Anita Bryant’s garbage rhetoric may be too strong a push for a more tolerant public
and prompt backlash (Mann 2010). This backlash may even take the form of
indignation and punish the anti-rights speaker by increasing support for lesbian and
gay rights.
We test these ideas by using three studies to examine the following hypotheses:
H1 Disgust rhetoric will produce feelings of disgust that lower support for rights
for and decrease evaluations of lesbians and gays among some individuals.
H2 In a more accepting time, disgust is no longer a reliable predictor of
opposition to lesbian and gay rights.

Data

To test our hypotheses, we analyze data from the 1993 American National Election
Studies (ANES) and two original studies.3 The ANES data allow us to demonstrate
the potential effect of disgust on political attitudes towards lesbians and gays in a
less inclusive era. The first original study asks participants to describe their own
emotions through thinking and writing about what made them feel that emotion
towards lesbians and gays. The second study experimentally exposes participants to
a news story about a same-sex marriage bill in Indiana with positive, neutral, and

3
Data and replication code for the analyses is available at https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.
xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/WYTRZC.

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disgust frames. This design allows us to test the impact of elite use of emotional
rhetoric as reported by the media. With this final study, we can test the causal
impact of disgust rhetoric on attitudes without concern that those people most
sensitive to disgust are simply more attentive and thus more reactive to this type of
rhetoric. We believe there is a significant difference in how disgust informs the
politics of lesbian and gay rights before the modern shift in attitudes. We first turn to
the ANES 1993 Pilot test to establish a baseline of how disgust operated in the
political world before major shifts in attitudes among the mass public on gay rights
(Brewer 2007, 2014; Flores 2015). The ANES data demonstrates that disgust was a
potent predictor of attitudes towards lesbians and gays in the early 1990s, right as
significant debate over gay rights began. In contrast to the ANES data, our original
studies show that the contemporary effects of disgust are less powerful and more
contingent. While feeling disgust can dampen support for policies that benefit
lesbians and gays, disgust must also compete with anger, an emotion that we find
may offset the effects of disgust.

ANES Pilot 1993

To understand the extent to which disgust influenced support for gay rights in the
past, we turn to the ANES 1993 Pilot test. The 1993 pilot interviewed 750
respondents originally interviewed in the 1992 election study. The 1993 study
provides an ideal way to test the impact of disgust on attitudes because it includes an
extensive battery measuring respondents’ views on homosexuality as well as
multiple gay rights questions.4 The 1993 study asked three policy questions about
lesbian and gay rights—whether lesbians and gays should be able to serve in the
military, should be legally permitted to adopt children, and whether laws should
protect gays and lesbians from job discrimination. These rights questions were also
asked in the 1992 wave and we control for respondents’ prior attitudes on these
policies in our models. Respondents also rated how warmly they felt toward gays
and lesbians on a 101-point feeling thermometer.
Overall, attitudes toward gay rights differed significantly by policy area. A
majority of respondents in both 1992 and 1993 favored allowing lesbians and gays
to serve in the military and supported laws that prohibited job discrimination based
on sexual orientation. In 1992, 61 percent of respondents supported allowing gays to
serve in the military. By fall 1993, the month before the signing of ‘‘Don’t Ask,
Don’t Tell’’, 62 percent supported military service, with 10 percentage point more
respondents in the ‘‘strong support’’ category than the previous year. Similarly, 64
percent of respondents in 1992 and 63 percent in 1993 support job discrimination

4
This is the only wave of the ANES that includes both gay rights questions and disgust questions that are
unconnected from candidate evaluations. Disgust originates from a need to protect against toxic
substances and groups, and we expect that the political reaction is to support policies that will most
effectively protect the polity from the perceived source of disgust. People who are disgusted by Bill
Clinton and people disgusted by homosexuality should support very different types of policies to avoid
being ‘‘contaminated’’ by the objects of disgust. Political elites who draw on disgust imagery to oppose
gay rights policies use homosexuality as their target, as the ANES questions do.

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protections. In contrast, there was strong opposition to allowing lesbians and gays to
adopt children and evaluations of lesbians and gays themselves were quite cold. In
both 1992 and 1993, 71 percent of respondents opposed adoption rights for same-
sex couples. In 1993, respondents gave lesbians and gays an average feeling
thermometer rating of 39, rating them on the ‘‘cold’’ end of the thermometer.
To measure disgust, the survey includes two questions directly tapping
respondents’ feeling of disgust about homosexuality, asking respondents (1)
whether they felt disgusted about the ‘‘very idea of homosexuality’’ and (2) whether
homosexuality made them uncomfortable. We use a measure that combined these
questions into a 4-point scale from ‘‘not uncomfortable or disgusted’’ to ‘‘strongly
disgusted’’ with higher values indicating more disgust. Most ANES respondents
express some level of disgust or discomfort with homosexuality5—45 percent said
they were neither disgusted nor uncomfortable with 42 percent expressing disgust
and 13 percent expressing discomfort if not outright disgust. Men were more likely
to be disgusted by homosexuality than women (X2 = 15.02, p \ 0.01) as were
respondents who endorsed more traditional views of morality (X2 = 158.52,
p \ 0.01),6 Republican respondents compared to Democrats and Independents
(X2 = 50.00, p \ 0.01) and conservative respondents compared to liberals and
moderates (X2 = 40.81, p \ 0.01). These associations may be related to the higher
prevalence of disgust sensitivity among conservatives (Inbar et al. 2009) or to more
consistent use of disgust rhetoric by conservative religious and political leaders
(Herman 1996).
While baseline support varies across different types of policies, the effect of
disgust on these attitudes is consistent across the four policy measures. Respondents
who felt more disgusted about homosexuality were significantly less supportive of
rights. These data cannot test the causal direction, whether disgust is a byproduct of
political talk or the antecedent of political identification. However, there are clear
connections between disgust about homosexuality and political attitudes. We use
the 1993 data to model the effect of disgust on support for job protections, the right
to serve in the military, adoption rights, and the feeling thermometer using OLS. We
scaled the policy dependent variables to vary between 0 and 1, with higher values
indicating more support for lesbian and gay rights. The feeling thermometer varies
between 0 and 100, with higher values indicating more warmth toward lesbians and
gays. The models also control for respondents’ partisanship and ideology (7 point
scales), gender, moral traditionalism, and policy attitude measured in 1992, all
rescaled to vary between 0 and 1 with higher values indicating Republicans, more
conservative, and more morally traditional, and a dummy variable for gender with 1
equal to women.

5
Disgust is measured in the 1993 wave of the ANES.
6
We combine four questions asked in the 1992 wave of the ANES into a ‘‘moral traditionalism’’ index.
People were asked: 1. whether people should be more tolerant of those who live by their own moral
standards, 2. if the country would have fewer problems if there was more emphasis on traditional family
ties, 3. if newer lifestyles contribute to the breakdown of society, and 4. if it world is always changing and
we should adjust our view of morality to changing times. We combine these into an index (Cronbach’s
alpha = 0.65) rescaled from 0 to 1 so that higher values indicate more support for traditional morality.

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Disgust decreases support LGBT rights

Job protections Open service
.8

.8
.6

.6
Support

Support
.4

.4
.2

.2
0

0
0 .2 .4 .6 .8 1 0 .2 .4 .6 .8 1

Adoption Warmth toward gays & lesbians

Feeling thermometer
20 30 40 50 60
.8
.6
Support
.4
.2
0

0 .2 .4 .6 .8 1 0 .2 .4 .6 .8 1
Level of disgust Level of disgust

Fig. 1 Disgust decreases support for lesbian and gay rights 1993

As Fig. 1 demonstrates, disgust significantly decreases evaluations of and support

for rights policies for lesbians and gays, even controlling for prior attitudes.
Figure 1 displays the impact of moving across the disgust scale on attitudes. Disgust
decreases support for job discrimination protections by.18 (SE = 0.05) or 19% of
the scale, military service by 0.29 (0.05), and lowers already low support for
adoption rights by 0.15 (0.03). Similarly, respondents who find homosexuality very
disgusting rate lesbians and gays more negatively by 27 percentage points than
respondents more comfortable with homosexuality. Disgust is the only variable that
consistently predicts lesbian and gay rights attitudes, and is a significantly stronger
predictor of feelings toward lesbians and gays than partisanship [F(1, 350) = 20.85,
p \ 0.01] and ideology [F(1, 350) = 9.63, p \ 0.01]7 and a stronger predictor of
attitudes about military service than moral traditionalism [F(1342) = 4.75,
p \ 0.05] and ideology [F(1342) = 4.40, p \ 0.04]. Emotion substantially struc-
tured attitudes about lesbian and gay rights in 1993 over and above the effect of
prior attitudes about these rights or political identities such as partisanship.

Study 1: Bottom-up Disgust Manipulation

In the two decades since the 1993 ANES, support for gay rights has substantially
increased.8 Yet, even with the overall increase, this support is not universal and we
expect that disgust toward homosexuality may still undergird opposition to rights.
7
These tests were calculated using the postestimation ‘‘test’’ command in Stata.
8
For example, in the 2012 ANES, 61 percent of respondents supported adoption rights for gays and
lesbians, almost doubling support over the 1993 wave. Support for allowing gays to serve in the military
similarly increased from 55 percent support in 1992 to 86 percent in 2012.

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We use a bottom-up induction task to ask respondents to conjure feelings of disgust

about lesbians and gays. We then utilize their open-ended answers to describe the
nature of that disgust—why or what about lesbians and gays disgusted them. This
study demonstrates that there is significant variation in the causes of disgust about
lesbians and gays, that disgust may not be limited only to prompting restrictive
attitudes, and that respondents may feel not only disgust but also anger/indignation
in the face of disgust rhetoric (Kam and Estes 2016). Overall, this analysis shows
that disgust targeted at lesbians and gays can be evoked in the public, but that anger
is present as well. When instructed to feel disgusted about lesbian and gays as a
group, many respondents expressed disgust about traditional issues like physical
purity. Yet, others responded to the same instruction by becoming indignant and
disgusted at those who would discriminate against lesbians and gays.
We ran a study through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MT) workplace in summer
2014 that randomly assigned respondents to feel a discrete emotion (Berinsky et al.
2012). We recruited 317 MT respondents to take a survey of their views of ‘‘current
political issues.’’9 The MT sample is a convenience sample made up of respondents
who have access to the Internet, and it skews toward young (average age = 34),
educated (57% of respondents have a college degree or higher), and male (52% of
respondents). The sample is diverse politically but does tilt liberal (ideological self-
placement: 53% liberal, 24% moderate, 23% conservative) and Democratic
(partisan identification: 57% Democrats, 19% Independents, 24% Republicans).
Most importantly, though, we randomly assigned people to either describe disgust
or not, and the randomization was successful, and thus, it is the experimental
treatment rather than any underlying difference that should influence expressions of
disgust (see Table A.1 in the appendix for the experimental balance check).
The study randomly assigned respondents to feel disgust or not feel any
emotion.10 In order to manipulate emotions, we utilize a bottom up emotion
induction task where respondents focused on a group, object, or event that causes
them to feel a particular emotion and describe what makes them feel that emotion in
detail.11 Through the exercise of describing what causes the emotion, respondents
start to feel that emotion (Valentino et al. 2009, 2008; Gadarian and Albertson 2014;
Lerner and Keltner 2001).

9
This part of the study was part of a larger study of emotions that included an additional two conditions
that are not analyzed here. The larger sample has 659 respondents.
10
There were two additional conditions where respondents were asked to feel empathy or anger designed
for a different purpose that will not be analyzed here.
11
Disgust research typically involves two approaches to eliciting disgust in respondents. One method is
to expose respondents to a variety of physically disgusting stimuli. Examples of these kinds of treatments
include exposure to bad smells such as ‘fart gas’, asking respondents to complete tasks in unclean
environments, displaying disgusting videos, and asking respondents to recall physically disgusting
experiences (Schnall et al. 2008). Variations on this use a combination of photographs of disgusting
behaviors and implicit moral violations to elicit disgust responses, such as a photograph of a man eating a
handful of worms (Smith et al. 2011). Alternatively, disgust researchers use techniques such as asking
respondents to express judgments on a variety of moral transgressions, ranging from the trivial to the
severe, usually presented as vignettes (Chapman and Anderson 2013). Study 1 varies this second
technique by simply asking respondents to focus on what makes them feel disgusted.

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Respondents were asked to concentrate on what made them feel either disgusted
toward gays and lesbians in the disgust condition or to explain what came to mind
when thinking about lesbians and gays in the neutral condition.12 See the exact
wording for the disgust condition in footnote 12. We compared respondents in this
treatment to those respondents in the control condition where respondents wrote
about what came to mind when they thought about gays and lesbians.13 Across
conditions, we hold the target group constant and vary whether respondents are
asked to feel a discrete emotion.
Writing about disgust increases respondents’ level of expressed disgust but also
their anger over and above the effect of demographics, suggesting that in this
current period, communications that direct citizens to feel disgusted may not always
be successful. After the writing exercise, Study 1 respondents answered a series of
questions about their emotional reactions. We asked how strongly they felt:
disgusted, sickened, angry, furious, hopeful, relieved, enthused, and proud on a
9-point scale from ‘‘not at all’’ to ‘‘strongly’’. We created three scales from these
separate measures: Disgust (disgusted, sickened: Cronbach’s alpha = 0.91), Anger
(angry, furious: Cronbach’s alpha = 0.88), and Enthusiastic (hopeful, relieved,
enthused, and proud: Cronbach’s alpha = 0.87). The general emotion measures in
Study 1 vary between 1 and 8, with higher values meaning stronger emotion.14 One
thing to note is that these are measures of emotions themselves, not emotions
attached to lesbians and gays particularly. For comparison, Table 1 also displays an
OLS model of the impact of gender, partisanship, ideology, and moral tradition-
alism on disgust about homosexuality from the 1993 ANES data. In the ANES
models, the dependent variable is the same disgust/discomfort with homosexuality
discussed previously. The measure varies between 0 and 1 with higher values
indicating more disgust about homosexuality.
To compare the impact of demographics on the strength of emotion, we can
compare respondents Study 10 s neutral condition to the ANES respondents since
12
The disgust prompt read: We’re interested in how people react to different groups. There’s been a
great deal of attention lately to gays and lesbians. Please describe something about gays and lesbians that
made you feel DISGUSTED. Please describe how you felt as vividly and in as much detail as possible.
Think about the way the issues are talked about, recent court cases, and real world events. Examples of
things that have made some people feel DISGUST are statements made on the media, things said during
political debates and campaigns, or how everyday people discuss gays and lesbians. It is okay if you don’t
remember all the details, just be specific about what exactly it was that made you feel DISGUST and what
it felt like to be DISGUSTED. Take a few minutes to write out your answer.
13
The control prompt read: We’re interested in how people react to different groups. There’s been a
great deal of attention lately to gays and lesbians. Please describe something that comes to mind when
you think about gays and lesbians. Think about the way the issues are talked about, recent court cases, and
real world events. Examples of things that may come to mind are statements made on the media, things
said during political debates and campaigns, or how everyday people discuss gays and lesbians. It is okay
if you don’t remember all the details, just be specific about what exactly it was that comes to mind. Take a
few minutes to write out your answer.
14
Across all models, demographics are scaled to vary between 0 and 1 with higher values indicating
Republican (a 7-point scale), conservative (a 7-point scale), more traditional morality (see question
wordings in the ANES section) (16-point scale) and disgust sensitivity (16-point scale). Age is measured
in years and varies between 18 and 76 in Study 1. Gender and sexual orientation are dummy variables
with 1 equal to identifying as female and heterosexual. Disgust treatment is the effect of being assigned to
the disgust treatment (coded as 1) compared to the neutral condition (coded as 0).

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 532

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Table 1 Determinants of disgust over time
ANES 1993 Experiment 1: neutral condition Experiment 1: among all respondents

Disgust Disgust Angry Enthusiasm Disgust Angry Enthusiasm

Disgust treatment 2.07*** (0.285) 1.17*** (0.280) -1.34*** (0.242)

Female -0.18*** (0.045) -0.26 (0.385) -0.40 (0.382) (0.374) 0.00 (0.307) -0.08 (0.301) -0.16 (0.261)
Heterosexual -1.49** (0.682) -1.71** (0.676) 0.65 (0.662) -0.60 (0.572) -1.03* (0.561) 0.65 (0.486)
Partisanship 0.12 (0.081) -0.77 (0.915) -0.28 (0.907) 1.08 (0.888) 0.01 (0.705) -0.25 (0.691) 0.44 (0.598)
Ideology 0.22** (0.101) 0.40 (1.142) 0.12 (1.132) -2.48** (1.109) 0.03 (0.904) -0.28 (0.887) -1.45* (0.767)
Age 0.00 (0.001) -0.01 (0.014) -0.02 (0.014) -0.00 (0.014) -0.01 (0.011) -0.02 (0.011) -0.00 (0.010)
Morally tradition 0.56*** (0.108) 1.65* (0.946) 0.42 (0.937) -1.21 (0.918) 1.56** (0.733) 0.70 (0.719) -0.27 (0.622)
Disgust sensitivity 0.27 (0.993) -0.24 (0.984) 1.22 (0.964) 0.02 (0.742) -0.48 (0.727) 1.10* (0.630)
Constant 0.10 (0.085) 3.83*** (0.853) 5.36*** (0.845) 3.70*** (0.828) 2.88*** (0.694) 4.61*** (0.681) 3.63*** (0.589)
N 376 165 165 165 315 315 315
R2 0.182 0.052 0.067 0.089 0.168 0.077 0.117

* p \ .1; ** p \ .05; *** p \ .01

Polit Behav (2018) 40:521–543
Polit Behav (2018) 40:521–543 533

lesbians and gays were salient for both sets of respondents. In Study 1, respondents
in the neutral condition expressed low levels of disgust (Mdisgust = 2.69,
SD = 2.31), anger (Manger = 2.86, SD = 2.29), and enthusiasm (Menthus = 4.03,
SD = 2.28) after thought listing about lesbians and gays, indicating that these
emotions are not necessarily close to the surface. Comparing across the samples,
one major take away is that demographics are a much stronger predictor of disgust
in the 1993 ANES than in the 2014 MT sample. In 1993, demographics such as
gender, partisanship and ideology consistently determined disgust attached to
lesbians and gays, but by 2014, only moral traditionalism remained a clear
determinant of such disgust. Unlike respondents in the ANES, in Study 1, neither
partisanship nor ideology was a significant determinant of disgust and ideology only
mattered for enthusiasm. As respondents in the neutral condition went from liberal
to conservatives, the less enthusiastic they felt by 2.48 (SE = 1.109) or almost a
third of the 9-point scale.
The second major take-away from Table 1 is that the disgust treatment not only
significantly increased respondents’ expressed levels of disgust but also increased
anger significantly and depressed enthusiasm levels. Respondents who wrote about
what made them disgusted about lesbians and gays expressed more disgust by 2.07
on the 9-point scale (or about 23% of the scale) compared to those in the neutral
condition but also increased their anger by 1.17 on average and dampened their
enthusiasm by a similar amount (b = -1.34, SE = 0.24). These models demon-
strate that even when targeting one emotion, communications may trigger multiple
emotions that could affect policy attitudes in multiple ways. Because respondents in
Study 1 wrote down their thoughts as part of the exercise, we have qualitative
evidence about what considerations they brought to mind in each condition.
Respondents articulated a wide variety of associations in response to the open-
ended prompts. Table 2 provides several qualitative examples of responses. We
analyzed a random sample of 30 open-ended responses for content and tone, 14
from the neutral condition and 16 from the disgust condition. The neutral group’s
responses overwhelmingly presented a procedural equality frame, centering

Table 2 Examples of statements in the conditions

No Emotion Disgust

I think that they should have the same rights as
everyone else in the country. I do not personally
want to be gay or anything, but I really don’t
want anyone prying into my private life
About the only thing that comes to mind is that gay
people want to be treated like everyone else, and
I can respect that. They have a different lifestyle
than mine, but that’s okay
Common stereotypes would say that these people
are child molesters and murderers and are
tainting society when in reality those things have
nothing to do with what sex someone is interested
in
I think it is disgusting because life should be about
a man and a woman and they should be able to
reproduce offspring
I felt disgusted… during the NFL draft a openly
gay candidate was chosen and his lover embraced
him with a huge kiss
I felt disgusted by the lack of compassion some
people choose to show for gays and lesbians
because of their hatred for those who are different
from them

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534 Polit Behav (2018) 40:521–543

generally on the provision of equal rights to lesbians and gays. The disgust group’s
responses were varied, falling into several categories. These include (1) pro-gay
respondents who were disgusted by the ways that lesbians and gays are treated by
the law and by their opponents, (2) pro-gay respondents who did not express disgust
but rather anger directed at unequal treatment and the opposition, and (3) anti-gay
respondents who expressed disgust based on sex acts and moral violations. This
latter category reflects theoretical expectations about how disgust should act in the
political world, connecting disgusting phenomenon (e.g. sexual deviance) with
marginalized groups (e.g. those groups most likely to engage in deviant behavior).
Though we directed respondents to feel a single, discrete emotion in each treatment,
some respondents showed reticence to evoke those emotions, and buffered against
these feelings by doing things like expressing indignation at the treatment of
lesbians and gays rather than the behavior of lesbians and gays themselves. This
demonstrates that while disgust may be increased through a relatively simple
induction, the causes behind and targets of the disgust can vary significantly—and
in ways that theory typically does not predict.
The qualitative coding suggests that disgust rhetoric may provoke disgust
directed at the speaker and not the intended target. In our second study, we
specifically test the efficacy and implications of disgust rhetoric.

Study 2: Disgust as Political Rhetoric

In Study 2, we use a newspaper story to evoke disgust to get closer to the ways that
political elites using disgust rhetoric may influence policy attitudes. This allows us
to increase external validity. Study 2 randomly assigned respondents to read one of
three versions (positive, neutral, disgust) of a story about an actual proposed
constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage in Indiana. All respondents
read about the proposed amendment itself and the groups that rallied either in
support or opposition to the amendment. We varied the emotion of the language that
the groups used in their advocacy.
Table 3 below outlines the differences between the conditions. In the neutral
condition, the quoted speaker used non-emotional language to advocate that people
contact their legislators. In the positive emotion condition, the quoted speaker

Table 3 Experimental treatments

Positive Condition Neutral Condition Disgust Condition

Picture

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Polit Behav (2018) 40:521–543 535

focused on the similarities between same-sex families and their neighbors. In the
disgust condition, the quoted speaker advocated that people support the bill and
evoked disgust by emphasizing the threats posed to the polity by deviants. In
addition to the speaker’s language, the stories varied the language that appeared on a
protest sign being held by a man in an accompanying photograph. In the neutral
condition, the sign read ‘‘Call your representatives’’. In the positive condition, the
sign read ‘‘Love, Family, Commitment’’, and in the disgust condition, the sign read
‘‘The Anus is a Grave’’. We included a positive vignette as to test whether positive
rhetoric similar to that used by the lesbian and gay movement could inspire positive
feelings in our respondents and increased support (Harrison and Michelson 2012).
We used a generally positive framing in order to mimic actual messages from
advocates as closely as possible, similar to our efforts to mimic actual disgust
rhetoric. See the appendix for the full transcript of the treatment.
Our disgust treatment closely mirrors the kinds of disgust rhetoric deployed by
anti-gay elites. For example, language in the disgust treatment states, ‘‘We have a
moral duty to defend the institution of traditional marriage as being between one
man and one woman,’’ Price said. ‘‘Two men will never be able to reproduce. Anal
penetration can never result in the creation of new life.’’ This language is similar to
a statement made by Pat Robertson on his show the 700 Club (Post 2014). Similarly,
our positive condition mimics messaging that lesbian and gay rights advocates have
used to increase support in marriage debates (Fisher 2009; Solomon 2014).
We used MT to recruit a (separate) sample of 636 respondents to participate in a
study on public opinion in 2014. Study 20 s MT sample is diverse on several
dimensions such as partisanship (39% Democrats, 17% Republicans) and ideology
(53% liberals, 22% conservative), although it skews young (average age = 33) and
male (66%). As in our first experiment, there is balance across the conditions,
meaning that the randomization was successful and it is the experimental treatment
rather than any underlying difference that should influence attitudes.
After reading the treatment stories, respondents were asked how disgusted,
worried, angry, hopeful, and sickened they felt on a scale from 1 (not at all) to 8
(very strongly), which we rescaled to vary between 0 and 1 with higher values being
stronger emotions.15 The disgust treatment successfully increased respondents’
negative emotional reactions over the neutral control condition and decreased the
positive emotion of hope. As expected, the disgust treatment significantly raised
respondents’ level of disgust by 0.15 on the 0–1 scale or 50% over the control
condition (Mcontrol = 0.30, Mtreat = 0.45, t = 4.52, p \ 0.01) but did not raise
respondents’ worry (Mcontrol = 0. 31, Mdisgust = 0.32).
As Study 1 demonstrated, respondents often counter disgust, and persuasive
language about disgust may increase the probability that respondents react against
the language itself (Brehm and Brehm 1981). The disgust story not only raised
feelings of disgust, but also affected anger and enthusiasm. The disgust treatment
significantly increased anger by a similar magnitude of 0.13 (Mcontrol = 0.37,
Mdisgust = 0.50, t = 4.22, p \ 0.01) and also decreased enthusiasm by 0.21 or a
58% decrease over the control condition (Mcontrol = 0.39, Mdisgust = 0.18, t = 7.98,

15
We combine ‘‘disgusted’’ and ‘‘sickened’’ together into an index (Cronbach’s alpha = 0.88).

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536 Polit Behav (2018) 40:521–543

p \ 0.01). In contrast, subjects reacted emotionally to the positive story in largely

identical ways to the neutral, emotion-less control condition. Table 4 shows an OLS
model of the effect of the treatments on feelings of disgust and anger that controls
for respondents’ disgust sensitivity16 as well their gender, religious identity,
partisanship, ideology, and education. Even controlling for the effects of psycho-
logical and political predispositions, the disgust treatment significantly increased
both disgust and anger. When modeling the effect of the treatment on rights
attitudes, we consider how both anger and disgust affect opinions.
Respondents answered a series of questions that asked how supportive they were
of a variety of lesbian and gay rights issues, some of which are already law and
some that are still being negotiated at the state and federal level. These rights
included allowing gays and lesbians to adopt children, extending hate crime and job
discrimination protections based on sexual orientation, providing health insurance to
same-sex partners, and allowing same-sex partners to immigrate to the United
States. Respondents also answered two questions specifically about marriage—
whether they generally support same-sex marriage and, whether as an Indiana voter,
they would vote for an amendment to ban same-sex marriage (-1), keep the status
quo of a ban by statute (0), or legalize same-sex marriage (1).17 Respondents also
evaluated whether they would vote for a lesbian or gay candidate for president and
whether federal funding for AIDS/HIV should be increased, decreased, or kept the
same. Except for the Indiana marriage question, each of the other questions is a
5-point scale that varies between 0 and 1 with higher values indicating higher levels
of support for rights or more support for funding.
In Table 5, we use a mediation model that accounts for the level of disgust each
respondent expressed to model the effect of disgust on rights attitudes. Because the
disgust treatment also increased anger, we also include respondents’ level of anger
in the mediation models and check anger’s effect on rights opinions. By using these
measures, we can test whether disgust is mediating the relationship between the
experimental manipulation and support or opposition to lesbian and gay rights.
Consistent with our hypothesis, the disgust treatment led respondents to signif-
icantly decrease their support for a variety of rights and does so through increasing
feelings of disgust. Table 5 shows the effect of being in the treatment condition and
feelings of disgust on the rights questions including pretreatment variables
(ideology and partisanship).18 The models in Table 5 show that feelings of disgust
significantly mediate the effect of the disgust condition for 7 of the 9 rights
questions. In other words, the disgust treatment decreases support for a variety of
rights, including marriage, immigration rights for same-sex partners, and protection

16
We measure respondents’ sensitivity to disgust prior to exposure to the treatment using the DS-R scale,
which includes multiple measures of comfort with objects like dead bodies or maggots (Olatunji et al.
2007).
17
These questions were asked prior to the Supreme Court’s decision legalizing same-sex marriage
nationwide in 2015.
18
We include anger only in the second stage model that predicts opinion as a function of emotions and
the treatment. Including anger as a predictor of disgust would imply that anger was a cause of disgust and
would thus be a post-treatment confounder, which would violate the sequential ignorability assumption
that underlies these mediation models.

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Polit Behav (2018) 40:521–543 537

Table 4 Disgust treatment significantly increased disgust and anger

Disgust Anger

Disgust sensitivity scale 0.34 (0.081) 0.37 (0.083) 0.06 (0.091) 0.09 (0.090)
Disgust treatment 0.14 (0.030) 0.14 (0.029) 0.14 (0.033) 0.14 (0.031)
Positive treatment -0.02 (0.030) -0.01 (0.029) 0.05 (0.033) 0.06 (0.032)
Female -0.01 (0.026) 0.05 (0.028)
Education -0.01 (0.009) -0.01 (0.010)
Born again Christian 0.03 (0.035) -0.04 (0.038)
PID -0.12 (0.067) -0.07 (0.072)
Ideology -0.15 (0.070) -0.33 (0.076)
Constant 0.15 (0.044) 0.28 (0.060) 0.34 (0.050) 0.49 (0.065)
N 636 636 636 636
R-squared 0.076 0.118 0.029 0.135

Source: 2014 MT Rights Experiment. Model: OLS. Bold indicates coefficient is significant at p \ 0.05.
Dependent variable is a 9-point scale of how strongly respondent felt the emotion, rescaled from 0 to 1
with higher values indicating stronger emotion

from job discrimination, through increasing respondents’ level of disgust. Feelings

of disgust dampen support for rights in a substantively large way, varying between
10% of the scale (job discrimination protection) to 28% of the scale (marriage).
Even in a liberal-leaning sample, invoking disgust decreased their support for
policies that are already legal in many states, like allowing same-sex couples to
adopt children. Disgust did not significantly affect opinions about AIDS spending or
hate crime protections, suggesting that disgust may not expand to all issues easily or
at least not when the disgusting language is geared toward a specific policy like
marriage.
Across the rights models in Table 5, anger significantly increases support for
rights across 8 of the 9 models in magnitudes almost identical to the effect of
disgust. The mediation coefficients also show that the disgust treatment affected
attitudes through increasing anger, not simply that pre-occurring anger influenced
opinion.19 Anger strongly increases support for lesbian and gay rights across the
spectrum, and we can speculate that this indignation is fueled by a reaction to the
anti-rights rhetoric present in our disgust treatment.20 Combined with the findings
about the different objects of disgust in the open-ended disgust measures in Study 1,
disgust rhetoric may be a powerful tool but it does not come without a price. This
price may be found in a form of emotional backlash among segments of the
population who are supportive of rights and who react with indignation and in ways
that anti-gay elites would not want them to.

19
It is not the case that it is different people become angry and disgusted; these emotions correlated at
0.67 (p \ 0.01). Yet, the effects of these emotions are countervailing.
20
One alternative mechanism is that anger is an indicator of empathy here, but we do not have the
requisite measure of empathy to test this mechanism.

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 Table 5 Disgust decreases support for gay rights
538

Insurance Adoption Gay president Hate crime Immigration AIDS Job discrim. SSM Indiana SSM
spending

123
Disgust 0.03 (0.02) 0.02 (0.02) 0.03 (0.03) 0.02 (0.03) 0.01 (0.02) 0.01 (0.02) 0.03 (0.02) 0.03 (0.02) 0.13 (0.05)
treatment
Positive 0.02 (0.02) 0.03 (0.02) 0.03 (0.02) 0.01 (0.03) 0.01 (0.02) 0.00 (0.02) 0.01 (0.02) 0.02 (0.02) 0.11 (0.05)
treatment
Disgust -0.21 (0.04) -0.27 (0.04) -0.23 (0.04) -0.08 (0.05) 20.16 (0.04) 0.06 (0.03) 20.10 (0.04) 20.28 (0.04) 20.55 (0.09)
Anger 0.29 (0.04) 0.36 (0.04) 0.36 (0.04) 0.26 (0.04) 0.29 (0.04) 0.08 (0.03) 0.22 (0.03) 0.39 (0.04) 0.60 (0.09)
PID 0.08 (0.05) 0.00 (0.06) 0.02 (0.06) -0.02 (0.06) -0.01 (0.05) -.03 (0.04) 0.07 (0.05) 0.04 (0.05) 0.01 (0.11)
Ideology 20.51 (0.05) 20.46 (0.06) 20.55 (0.06) 20.30 (0.06) 20.45 (0.06) 20.31 (0.05) 20.37 (0.05) 20.57 (0.06) 20.99 (0.12)
Constant 0.87 (0.03) 0.88 (0.03) 0.85 (0.03) 0.78 (0.03) 0.84 (0.03) 0.68 (0.02) 0.85 (0.02) 0.89 (0.03) 0.92 (0.06)
N 636 636 636 636 636 636 636 636 636
R2 0.32 0.33 0.36 0.18 0.32 0.24 0.08 0.38 0.29
Mediation by disgust
Mediation -0.03 -0.04 -0.03 -0.01 -0.02 0.01 -0.01 -0.04 -0.08
effect
95% CI [-0.05, -0.01] [-0.06,.-0.02] [-0.05, -0.02] [-0.03, 0.00] [-0.04, -0.01] [-0.00, 0.02] [-0.03, -0.00] [-0.06, -0.02] [-0.12, -0.04]
Direct Effect 0.03 [-0.01, 0.02 [-0.02, 0.03 [-0.02, 0.02 [-.03, 0.01 [-0.03, 0.01 [-.03, 0.03 [-0.01, 0.03 [-.01, 0.08] 0.13 [0.03,
0.07] 0.07] 0.08] 0.07] 0.06] 0.05] 0.07] 0.23]
Total Effect 0.00 [-0.03, -0.02 [-0.05, -0.01 [-0.04, 0.01 -0.01 [-0.05, 0.02 [-0.02, 0.02 [-0.01, -0.01 [-0.04, 0.05 [-0.02,
0.03] 0.02] 0.03] [-0.04,0.06] 0.03] 0.06] 0.06] 0.03] 0.13]
Mediation by anger
Mediation 0.04 0.05 0.05 0.04 0.03 0.04 0.01 0.05 0.09
effect
95% CI [.02, .07] [0.03,.08] [.03,.08] [.02,.06] [.02,.05] [.02,.07] [.00,.02] [.03,.09] [.05, .14]
Direct Effect 0.03 [-0.01, 0.02 [-0.02, 0.03 [-0.02, 0.02 [-0.03, 0.01 [-0.03, 0.01 [-0.03, 0.03 [-0.01, 0.03 [-0.01, 0.13 [0.03,
0.07] 0.07] 0.08] 0.07] 0.06] 0.05] 0.07] 0.08] 0.23]
Total Effect 0.07 [0.01, 0.07 [-0.04, 0.08 [0.01, 0.15] 0.05 0.06 [0.01, 0.12] 0.05 [-0.01, 0.02 [-0.02, 0.09 [0.02, 0.16] 0.21 [0.08,
0.13] 0.03] [-0.01,0.13] 0.12] 0.07] 0.36]

Bold indicates coefficient is significant at p \ 0.05

Polit Behav (2018) 40:521–543
Polit Behav (2018) 40:521–543 539

Conclusion: From Disgust to Rights

Disgust shapes our politics. It is a powerful but contingent rhetorical tool that can
powerfully shape public attitudes, especially on issues of sexual purity, but that
efficacy must come with a strong caveat: our findings show that some members of
the public will reject disgust rhetoric as an indignant reaction against the speaker. If
they dislike the message they hear, they may become angry. And sometimes, that
anger offsets any elicited disgust and respondents may relate disgust to gay rights
opponents rather than its intended targets. Our argument about the changing politics
of disgust may be partially rooted in changing norms that make it more socially
acceptable to disguise anti-gay attitudes, but we argue that social desirability is an
insufficient explanation for the indignant backlash that we observe in our results. If
our young and liberal respondents were simply acceding to more inclusive norms,
we would be unlikely to observe an indignant backlash—it is more likely that there
would be no effect, with something that is not deeply felt.
We believe that disgust is simply less relevant in a world where 75% of
Americans report personally knowing lesbians and gays. It is harder to discriminate
against someone or find them disgusting when you are personally connected to
them. This depth of personal contact likely explains the pro-gay anger and disgust
toward gay rights opponents expressed by respondents in Study 1. But reduced
relevance is not irrelevancy. Disgust proved effective in dampening support for a
wide variety of rights in Study 2. Public acceptance of lesbians and gays has
increased, but not universally. Some Americans remain opposed, and others may be
flexible in their support. This presents anti-gay rights elites with an opportunity that
we explore in Study 2: using disgust language and imagery to influence attitudes
towards lesbians and gays. The most effective use of this tool appears to be not only
to remind people that lesbians and gays are ‘‘disgusting’’ but to also draw the
connection between this disgust and policies that elites want to oppose. The findings
in Study 2 suggest that, when prompted by political elites to consider both disgust
and relevant policies, individuals make a connection between the emotion and the
policies in question. To this extent, disgust rhetoric still works with some people,
shifting attitudes on policy in a manner similar to the 1993 ANES data. This may
come at the cost of inadvertently provoking anger and indignation among other
people.
In both of our studies, considering disgust aimed at lesbians and gays produced
significant emotional backlash. In Study 1, this backlash takes the form of disgust on
behalf of lesbians and gays, directed at their opponents. Some respondents also
responded with anger or indignation, stating that lesbians and gays are treated
unfairly. The disgust treatment in Study 2 also provoked anger, and in turn, anger
increased support for rights. Respondents in Study 2 did not provide reasons for
their anger, but given the open-ended responses from Study 1, we believe that anger
occurring in response to disgust rhetoric and increasing support for rights observed
in Study 2 comports with our content analysis of the open-ended responses and
represents a pro-gay backlash.

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540 Polit Behav (2018) 40:521–543

While our analysis is limited to the gay rights context, our findings have
implications beyond these issues. Our results suggest two major directions for future
research. First, what kinds of rhetoric are most effective at prompting disgust in a
political environment? As we note, many disgust studies use direct treatments such
as exposure to disgusting stimuli to prompt participants to actually experience the
emotion. These studies can demonstrate powerful effects, but they do not go far
enough in approximating how politics actually works. A better understanding of the
types and styles of disgust rhetoric is itself a useful topic, but we also suggest a
practical result for advocacy groups—in better understanding disgust rhetoric, we
can also gain more leverage in countering such language. Similarly, we can find
whether disgust rhetoric targeted at other populations is equally effective. While
disgust is uniquely predictive on issues of sexual purity, populations that are
negatively targeted through such language (e.g. the implication that immigrants
bring disease) may be subject to some of the same effects. The dynamics of
backlash that we document in the gay rights context may not appear in areas where
opinion has been more static.
Second, we wonder whether the nexus of negative emotions that often appears in
rights-restricting discourses is necessary for them to be effective. These emotional
messages may be finely tuned enough to be considered a form of affective
microtargeting, but our results showing emotional backlash make us skeptical of the
real efficacy of such microtargeting. Emotional rhetoric is a powerful but not
particularly subtle tool. Negative emotions often co-occur with one another, may not
be easily separable, and may not work as intended when provoked by political
discourse. Further study of these clusters of negative emotion in politics and their
possible unintended consequences would do much to link disgust research to other
emotions.
All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in
accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research
committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or
comparable ethical standards. The original research in this article were reviewed by
the Syracuse University Institutional Review Board as study 13-159.

Acknowledgements The authors are listed in alphabetical order. We would like to thank Aaron
Hoffman, Seth Jolly, Dan McDowell, Spencer Piston, Josh Thompson, participants at Purdue University,
the Moynihan Research Workshop, and the Midwest Political Science Association 2014 annual meeting
for feedback on earlier versions of this paper. We also owe thanks to the editor and the anonymous
reviewers for their feedback and subsequent improvements to the paper. Finally, we thank the Department
of Political Science and the Maxwell School at Syracuse University for their support of this project.

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