These 27 non-political questions can predict whether you’re a Republican or Democrat

Tod Perry
Fri, 27 Dec 2024 20:40:00 +0000
Quiz, Politics

Recent polls suggest that Republicans and Democrats have slightly different tastes that have nothing to do with politics.

Americans tend to choose their political party based on a number of factors: family, gender, religion, race and ethnicity, and even region all have a hand in shaping a person's political ideology. Famously, George Washington warned the country against a two-party system in his Farewell Address on September 17, 1796. Our first president cited fears that "partisanship would lead to a 'spirit of revenge' in which party members would not govern for the good of the people, but for power."

Over 220 years later, Washington may have been right, but things aren't as dire as they seem. As reported by CBS News, a recent study by the Pew Research Group found that while a lot does divide us, there's much more that we have in common on average.

In short, a lot goes into where we fall on the political spectrum, but an interesting new quiz from ChartsMe has taken things to the next level. It claims to be 98% effective in determining people's political affiliations by asking questions that—get this—have nothing to do with politics.

Take the quiz here.

So, how does it work? (I recommend you take the quiz before we break down what's going on!)

The quiz uses Jonathan Haidt's Disgust Scale and takes you through a series of questions and scenarios to determine how disgusted certain situations make you. According to ChartsMe, a 2014 study published with the National Library of Medicine (NLM) found that people who were more prone to disgust are more conservative. This leads them to more closely align with the Republican Party. Further research conducted in 2022 bolstered this finding by investigating the "Conservative-Disgust Paradox" in reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Some research disputes this though.

In 2019, the British Psychological Society cited a study that found that levels of disgust between conservatives and liberals are generally the same but highly "context-dependent." In other words, some liberals have higher disgust sensitivity than conservatives and vice versa depending on the topic, image, or idea.

Overall, it's human to feel disgust. Some scientists believe it's ancestral and that the adverse reactions to conditions we'd label “disgusting" were used to protect primitive ancestors from contamination and disease. According to National Geographic, Charles Darwin proposed that disgust served an evolutionary purpose in the late 1860s. It evolved, he noted, to "prevent our ancestors from eating spoiled food that might kill them." Helpful!

So, maybe being grossed out isn't inherently a conservative or liberal emotion, but the science tells us that what grosses us out and how deeply we're grossed out by it just might indicate our political leanings.

Do you agree with your ChartsMe results? Did they get it right? Either way, I think we can all agree this stuff is pretty neat.

This article originally appeared six years ago.