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People who are more avoidant of pathogens are more politically conservative, as are nations with greater parasite stress. In the current research, we test two prominent hypotheses that have been proposed as explanations for the relationship between pathogens and politics. The first, which is an intragroup, traditional norms account, holds that these relationships are based on motivations to adhere to local norms, which are sometimes shaped by cultural evolution to have pathogen neutralizing properties. The second, which is an intergroup, outgroup-avoidance account, holds that relationships between pathogen avoidance and ideology are based on motivations to avoid contact with outgroups (who might pose greater infectious disease threats than ingroup members). Results from a study surveying 11,501 participants across 30 nations are more consistent with the traditional norms account than with the outgroup-avoidance account. National parasite stress relates to traditionalism (an aspect of conservatism especially related to adherence to group norms) but not to social dominance orientation (an aspect of conservatism especially related to endorsements of intergroup barriers and negativity toward ethnic and racial outgroups). Further, individual differences in pathogen-avoidance motives (i.e., disgust sensitivity) relate more strongly to traditionalism than to social dominance orientation within the 30 nations.

There is a story told in Wales of a certain John Jones, a stalwart of the local choir, who died and arrived up above just in time for a Heavenly Choir practice. He immediately took his place and, looking around, found that there were a thousand tenors, a thousand sopranos and a thousand contraltos but only himself in the bass. Nothing daunted, he gave of his best in the opening chorus until suddenly the Heavenly Conductor rapped on the podium and turning to John Jones, said, “Not quite ao loud in the bass, please, Mr. Jones”. It has been much the same in the field of emigration; for every John Jones who went to America, whole choirs of other nationalities flooded in, and, with a few exceptions, subsequent narrators of the story of the Welsh in America, have sung, on both sides of the Atlantic, very loudly in the bass. The quality of the Welsh contribution to the United States as against the quantity of that contribution has been bolstered by filio-pietistic writers who have claimed for the Welsh nation, Roger Williams (who was not a Welshman), many of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson, Lincoln, Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davies, John L. Lewis and Frank Lloyd Wright among many hundreds of other “eminent Welshmen”. Possibly the high water mark of such claims has been that of the discovery of America by Prince Madoc in the twelfth century, and the legend of the Welsh-speaking Welsh Indians, which was taken up again with great zeal in the nineteenth century and has lingered on to the present day despite the researches of Thomas Stephens which have reduced the claim to that of a romantic legend.