Disgust and Moral Judgment: Distinguishing Between Elicitors and Feelings Matters

Abstract

We investigated the scope of the effect of disgust on moral judgments. In two field experiments (Experiment 1, N = 142, Experiment 2, N = 248), we manipulated whether participants were exposed to a disgusting odor. Participants then rated the permissibility of actions in two kinds of moral problems: dilemmas and transgressions. In both experiments, disgust did not affect moral judgments when we compared across exposure levels. However, self-reported disgust did predict moral judgments in the following cases: In Experiment 1, it was linked with decreased acceptability for dilemmas and transgressions alike; in Experiment 2, it was linked with decreased acceptability for dilemmas only. Findings also differed across the experiments when we regressed feelings of disgust onto participants’ utilitarian and deontological inclinations. Overall, the findings suggest that subjective feelings of disgust may provide a more sensitive measure of the effect of disgust on moral judgment than basing analysis on the presence of disgust elicitors.

How disgust affects social judgments

“…However, research in the last few years has largely borne out the pessimistic case. As it has become easier to publish non-significant results, more researchers have reported finding null relationships between disgust and moral condemnation (Białek et al, 2021;Jylkkä et al, 2021;Sanyal et al, 2021). Furthermore, two large replication attempts of early and influential studies have failed to replicate the original results.…”

Specificity Versus Generality: A Meta-Analytic Review of the Association Between Trait Disgust Sensitivity and Moral Judgment

“…However, the more recent research on this topic has not corroborated these earlier findings. Large-scale replications of original studies (Ghelfi et al, 2019;Johnson et al, 2016), highly powered new studies (Białek et al, 2021;Jylkkä et al, 2021;Sanyal et al, 2021), and even a meta-analysis (Landy & Goodwin, 2015) all point to there being either a null or trivially small effect of incidental disgust manipulations on moral judgment.…”

People who seem disgusting seem more immoral

“…Although research has supported the idea that incidental disgust influences moral judgments, it is unclear whether these effects are replicable, unique to disgust (vs. other emotions like anger), or able to be found at all (e.g., Ghelfi et al, 2011 ; Cheng et al, 2013 ; Royzman et al, 2014 ; Johnson et al, 2016 ; Jylkkä et al, 2020 ; Białek et al, 2021 , for a review, see Piazza et al, 2018 ). For example, a meta-analysis examining the effects of experimental manipulations of incidental disgust on moral judgments revealed that a small overall effect size was not significantly different from zero after controlling for publication bias ( Landy and Goodwin, 2015 , cf.…”

“…Despite open questions regarding the relationship of incidental disgust to moral judgment, other possibilities remain for how morality and disgust might be associated (e.g., Pizarro et al, 2011 ). For example, work has shown that feeling disgusted or having higher trait-level disgust sensitivity can influence moral judgments (e.g., Jones and Fitness, 2008 ; Horberg et al, 2009 ; Chapman and Anderson, 2014 ; Białek et al, 2021 ). Similarly, although the extent of harmfulness vs. disgust might better explain the moralization of some behaviors ( Royzman et al, 2014 ), and anger rather than disgust might be the predominant response when disgusting aspects of certain behaviors are excluded from stimuli ( Kayyal et al, 2015 ), certain classes of immoral and norm-violating acts have been explicitly tied to disgust responses (e.g., Rozin et al, 1999 ; Horberg et al, 2009 ; Giner-Sorolla and Chapman, 2017 ; Andersson et al, 2024 ).…”