Physiological Arousal and Self-Reported Valence for Erotica Images Correlate with Sexual Policy Preferences

Abstract

Individuals do not always accurately report the forces driving their policy preferences. Such inaccuracy may result from the fact that true justifications are socially undesirable or less persuasive than competing justifications or are unavailable in conscious awareness. Because of the delicate nature of these issues, people may be particularly likely to misstate the reasons for preferences on gay marriage, abortion, abstinence-only education and premarital sex. Advocates on both sides typically justify their preferences in terms of preserving social order, maintaining moral values, or protecting civil liberties, not in terms of their own sexual preferences. Though these are the stated reasons, in empirical tests we find that psychophysiological response to sexual images also may be a significant driver of policy attitudes.

Sensitive liberals and unfeeling conservatives? Interoceptive sensitivity predicts political liberalism

“…More generally, the observed divergence between self-reported interoceptive sensitivity and measured interoceptive accuracy appears consistent with past work showing that people’s self-reported emotional responses to stimuli often do not cohere with their physiological responses (e.g., Balzer & Jacobs, 2011; Friesen et al, 2017). Considered alongside the present findings, this past work underscores the need for caution in selecting appropriate measures of interoceptive sensitivity and related processes, while highlighting that there are numerous concerns and motivations (e.g., gender-based roles and expectations, social desirability motivations; Balzer & Jacobs, 2011; Friesen et al, 2017) that can systematically bias people’s self-reports of their internal states and physiological processes. Researchers seeking to deepen our understanding of the relation between interoception and political attitudes will likely benefit from simultaneously assessing both subjective perceptions of interoceptive sensitivity and objective interoceptive accuracy, as well as considering the traits and motivations that might drive the apparent disconnect between these different dimensions.…”

Hostile, Benevolent, Implicit: How Different Shades of Sexism Impact Gendered Policy Attitudes

“…Specifically, individuals who are more likely to associate women with the home and men with work likely hold a set of attitudes that suggest women should be mothers and, thus, be less supportive of women's reproductive freedom. It's also possible individuals may connect birth control to sexual behaviors like sex outside of marriage or multiple partners and oppose Planned Parenthood to further restrict women's sex lives (Friesen et al, 2017). Future research should consider measuring support for condom access or erectile dysfunction medication to further elicit the role of sexism in these domains related to men's sexuality.…”

Political attitudes vary with detection of androstenone

“…Though people are not consciously aware of their sensitivities to odors such as androstenone, it would appear that subthreshold detection is enough to exert a modest effect on some political orientations. Much like work conducted on nonconscious physiological responses to stimuli and associated political attitudes (Friesen et al, 2017;Gonzalez et al, 2015;Wagner et al, 2015), subthreshold detection of environmental signals may help us bypass many of the problems with survey self-reporting and lead to a fuller understanding of individual variation in preferences for group life. It would be particularly useful to test larger samples that could be split or moderated by sex to detect differences in how male and female responses to the hormone may alter its relationship with social preferences.…”