Think you’ve got someone pegged as liberal or conservative? Where someone lives or what car they drive may not reveal their political preferences as much as showing them a picture of maggots.

New research from Virginia Tech shows that the intensity of someone’s reaction to repulsive images (think dirty toilets, clogged kitchen sinks, and the aforementioned maggots) can predict their political ideology with 95-98 percent accuracy.

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“Remarkably, we found that the brain’s response to a single disgusting image was enough to predict an individual’s political ideology,” Read Montague, a Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute psychology professor who led the study, wrote in a press release.

The researchers analyzed functional MRI (fMRI) scans of 83 men and women who viewed images of both revolting and pleasant scenes. Conservatives had stronger responses to disgusting images.

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Although scientists don’t know why the response between conservatives and liberals differs, the researchers pursued the study in part because they suspected political leaning is heritable. Disgust reactions are likely inherited, they said, so perhaps political ideologies work within the same neural responses.

“We pursued this research because previous work in a twin registry showed that political ideology — literally the degree to which someone is liberal or conservative — was highly heritable, almost as heritable as height,” Montague, who directs the Computational Psychiatry Unit at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute, wrote in the press release.

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It’s not the first time people have tried to pin down traits of Democrats and Republicans — they’ve been tied to every from from favorite books to bedroom organization, according to a roundup in the Denver Post — but it’s perhaps the most unusual.

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