If you're living in the United States right now, politics is arguably something unavoidable and yet, best ignored. Despite the fact that politics, politicians, and policies should be working toward a better world for all of us, partisan division and bad actors have likely driven us to feel otherwise; it should be no surprise that, in the words of the Pew Research Center, "public trust in government near historic lows." But regardless of how we may feel about politics and government generally, we still have beliefs and ideologies individual to ourselves, and it does make some sense to get a better idea of what motivates those beliefs. To that end, there is a litany of political quizzes one can take online that purport to identify how we align ourselves on the political spectrum. Most of them -- take this or this for example -- ask us to respond to various political issues of the day. 

But there may be a better way.

Perhaps we should just look at pictures of dog poop and festering wounds.

If that sounds gross, well, that's the point. Being repulsed by something is a feature, not a bug, of survival. If you see a bunch of maggots attacking some food on the ground, you may be disgusted enough to not eat the food, even if you're otherwise starving -- and that may be the right response, as the food is probably spoiled and will likely make you sick. If you see a mess on the ground want go to pick it up, the overwhelming odor that it may give off will potentially stop you from touching something dangerous. As David Pizarro, a psychologist at Cornell University, told New Scientist, "Before we had developed any theory of disease, disgust prevented us from contagion.

But when it comes to our political leanings, we tend to think of ourselves as more rational and less reactionary; our views are shaped mostly by well-reasoned arguments backed by data, right? (Right??) Sure, our upbringing and life experiences shape those views, but politics are more than a gut feeling or subconscious result to stimuli. And that's probably true to a degree, but, as brain scans show, we probably shouldn't discount the impact of disgust, either. The Atlantic explains:

In the mid-2000s, a political scientist approached the neuroscientist Read Montague with a radical proposal. He and his colleagues had evidence, he said, that political orientation might be partly inherited, and might be revealed by our physiological reactivity to threats. To test their theory, they wanted Montague, who heads the Human Neuroimaging Laboratory at Virginia Tech, to scan the brains of subjects as they looked at a variety of images—including ones displaying potential contaminants such as mutilated animals, filthy toilets, and faces covered with sores—to see whether neural responses showed any correlation with political ideology. Was he interested?

Montague initially laughed at the idea—for one thing, MRI research requires considerable time and resources—but the team returned with studies to argue their case, and eventually, he signed on. When the data began rolling in, any skepticism about the project quickly dissolved. The subjects, 83 in total, were first shown a randomized mixture of neutral and emotionally evocative pictures—this second category contained both positive and negative images—while undergoing brain scans. Then they filled out a questionnaire seeking their views on hot-button political and social issues, in order to classify their general outlook on a spectrum from extremely liberal to extremely conservative. As Montague mapped the neuroimaging data against ideology, he recalls, “my jaw dropped.” The brains of liberals and conservatives reacted in wildly different ways to repulsive pictures: Both groups reacted, but different brain networks were stimulated. Just by looking at the subjects’ neural responses, in fact, Montague could predict with more than 95 percent accuracy whether they were liberal or conservative.