Authoritarianism has resurfaced as a research topic in political psychology, as it appears relevant to explain current political trends. Authoritarian attitudes have been consistently linked to feelings of disgust, an emotion that is thought to have evolved to protect the organism from contamination. We hypothesized that body odour disgust sensitivity (BODS) might be associated with authoritarianism, as chemo-signalling is a primitive system for regulating interpersonal contact and disease avoidance, which are key features also in authoritarianism. We used well-validated scales for measuring BODS, authoritarianism and related constructs. Across two studies, we found that BODS is positively related to authoritarianism. In a third study, we showed a positive association between BODS scores and support for Donald Trump, who, at the time of data collection, was a presidential candidate with an agenda described as resonating with authoritarian attitudes. Authoritarianism fully explained the positive association between BODS and support for Donald Trump. Our findings highlight body odour disgust as a new and promising domain in political psychology research. Authoritarianism and BODS might be part of the same disease avoidance framework, and our results contribute to the growing evidence that contemporary social attitudes might be rooted in basic sensory functions.
Tucker Carlson
Fox News host Tucker Carlson on Friday night drew connections between Democratic calls for Australian-style gun reform and prison rape.
“When is the last time you heard a Democratic politician praise the Australian solution to gun violence? A lot — if you’re watching CNN, you probably heard it today,” Carlson said while discussing the resurgent cries for gun control in the wake of the Parkland, Florida mass shooting on Valentine’s Day. “They say it all the time. The question is” do you know anything about how Australia implemented gun control?”
“They took the guns away from the population by force, and not just from criminals and people convicted of wrongdoing,” he continued. “The government of Australia took guns from law abiding people who had done nothing wrong. They punished the innocent!”
He then showed a public service announcement from Australia’s government-run three-month gun amnesty program, which featured a photograph of naked men showering that alluded to jail time for those who did not turn their guns in to the government.
“Effectively, the government threatened law abiding citizens with prison rape if they didn’t surrender their guns,” Carlson said, appearing to reference sexual […]
A white-crowned sparrow whistles in Monterey County, California.
Credit: yhelfman/iStock
As spring approaches, US farmers are gearing up to plant about 180 million acres in corn and soybeans—a combined land mass nearly twice the size of California, mostly in the Midwest. The great majority of the seeds they sow will be coated with neonicotinoid pesticides: synthetic chemicals thought to be harmless to humans but that attack bugs’ central nervous systems—and, as new research shows, hinder birds’ navigation abilities.
Neonics, as they’re known, are the globe’s most widely used class of insecticide, representing a multi-billion-dollar market for their primary makers, the agrichemical giants Bayer and Syngenta. Meanwhile, a growing body of research suggests they harm pollinators like bees, birds, and water-borne insects (a major food source for birds and fish). The European Union has maintained a moratoriumon several neonic uses since 2013.
Here’s a collection of the latest research on the ecological effects of these widely used farm chemicals:
Orange grove in California.
Credit: punahou77 / Flickr
A judge has ordered the California Department of Food and Agriculture to stop using chemical pesticides in its statewide program until the agency complies with state environmental laws.
The injunction, issued late last week, is a sweeping victory for 11 public-health, conservation, citizen and food-safety groups and the city of Berkeley. The coalition sued the state after unsuccessfully attempting for years to persuade the agency to shift to a sustainable approach to pest control that protects human health and the environment.
Despite thousands of comment letters urging the department to take a safer approach, officials in 2014 approved a program that gave them broad license to spray 79 pesticides, some known to cause cancer and birth defects, anywhere in the state, including schools, organic farms, public parks and residential yards.
Spraying was allowed indefinitely and required no analysis of the health and environmental impacts of the chemicals at the specific application sites and no public notice or scrutiny of treatment decisions. Many of the pesticides are also […]
For decades, the federal government, with the support of the National Rifle Association, has made it very difficult to answer a question at the heart of American public health and safety: Does gun control work?
The answer is hugely important given that guns killed nearly 39,000 Americans in 2016 alone. But after research on gun violence in the 1990s found that firearms do not — contrary to NRA talking points — make people safer, the group backed a federal funding freeze on gun policy research.
But studies have gone on — just without federal funding. And on Friday, a nonpartisan think tank, the RAND Corporation, released the results so far of its Gun Policy in America initiative, a two-year dive into the research on gun violence and the laws trying to curtail it.
RAND’s extensive report does not make any sweeping declarations about gun policy. It does, however, make clear that gun control research is very limited, calling on Congress to lift the NRA-backed funding freeze. It argues that this freeze has, by making it difficult to conduct […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
