How Disgust Affects Social Judgments

Abstract

The emotion of disgust has been claimed to affect a diverse array of social judgments, including moral condemnation, inter-group prejudice, political ideology, and much more. We attempt to make sense of this large and varied literature by reviewing the theory and research on how and why disgust influences these judgments. We first describe two very different perspectives adopted by researchers on why disgust should affect social judgment. The first is the pathogen-avoidance account, which sees the relationship between disgust and judgment as resulting from disgust’s evolved function as a pathogen-avoidance mechanism. The second is the extended disgust account, which posits that disgust functions much more broadly to address a range of other threats and challenges. We then review the empirical evidence to assess how well it supports each of these perspectives, arguing that there is more support for the pathogen-avoidance account than the extended account. We conclude with some testable empirical predictions that can better distinguish between these two perspectives.

Harmless bodily pleasures are moralized because they are perceived as reducing self-control and cooperativeness

“…Proponents of this hypothesis point to abundant research finding associations between moralizations of purity and feelings of disgust (Haidt et al, 1993;Haidt & Hersh, 2001;Rozin et al, 1999), disgustsensitivity (e.g., Crawford et al, 2014;Horberg et al, 2009;Inbar et al, 2009;Wagemans et al, 2018), or experimentally induced disgust (Horberg et al, 2009;Inbar et al, 2012). The ability of disgust to generate moral judgements, however, is increasingly disputed (Inbar & Pizarro, 2021;Kayyal et al, 2015;Piazza et al, 2018; see also Cameron et al, 2015), as correlations between disgust-sensitivity and purity moralizations disappear when perceptions of harm are controlled for Schein et al, 2016), and meta-analytic evidence (Landy & Goodwin, 2015), highly powered replications (Ghelfi et al, 2020;Johnson et al, 2016), and recent studies (Jylkkä et al, 2021) strongly suggest that feelings of disgust do not increase moral condemnation, nor cause moralization of otherwise morally neutral actions.…”