That’s the curious implication of findings collated from a series of eight studies using participants in the US and China that find a strong correlation between negative reactions to disrupted visual patterns and to social outsiders.

In other words, there may be a connection between feeling unaccountably annoyed that in a row of triangles one is upside down, and feeling angry at the sight of a gay person, or a Muslim, an African American – or, indeed, any individual who does not fit unobtrusively within a particular observer’s idea of a social norm.