Liberal fears are contagious

It has become a commonplace among social psychologists that one of the characteristics that unites conservatives is our sensitivity to disgust. A succession of experiments carried out over the past ten years seems to show that a person’s political views are linked to how disgusting they find the idea of, say, touching a toilet seat in a public lavatory. The more repulsed you are, the more likely you are to hold conservative positions on issues like gay marriage, immigration and abortion. These findings have been lapped up by liberal social scientists since they confirm their view of conservatives as uptight control freaks whose love of hierarchy and tradition is rooted in an irrational fear of contagion.

But like many findings in psychology, these experiments haven’t always been easy to replicate and a meta-analysis of 24 studies in 2013 found that the relationship between conservative opinions and sensitivity to disgust was fairly modest. Today, I wouldn’t be surprised if people on the left are more easily repulsed than those on the right. It is liberals who seem to be gripped by a horror of contamination, not conservatives. How else to explain the enthusiasm with which they’ve welcomed the quarantining of whole populations as a way of managing the outbreak of coronavirus?

Take Anneliese Dodds, Labour’s new shadow chancellor. Last week, she said she wouldn’t send her six-year-old son back to school on 1 June until she’d seen more evidence that it was safe. But so far, only two children under the age of 15 have died from Covid-19 in English hospitals, and according to the statistician David Spiegelhalter the risk of a child under 15 dying from coronavirus is one in 5.3 million. Is that not safe enough for the shadow chancellor? To be fair, her concern is that her son will transmit the virus to others, not catch it himself.