Individual Differences in Moral Disgust Do Not Predict Utilitarian Judgments, Sexual and Pathogen Disgust Do

Abstract

The role of emotional disgust and disgust sensitivity in moral judgment and decision-making has been debated intensively for over 20 years. Until very recently, there were two main evolutionary narratives for this rather puzzling association. One of the models suggest that it was developed through some form of group selection mechanism, where the internal norms of the groups were acting as pathogen safety mechanisms. Another model suggested that these mechanisms were developed through hygiene norms, which were piggybacking on pathogen disgust mechanisms. In this study we present another alternative, namely that this mechanism might have evolved through sexual disgust sensitivity. We note that though the role of disgust in moral judgment has been questioned recently, few studies have taken disgust sensitivity to account. We present data from a large sample (N = 1300) where we analyzed the associations between The Three Domain Disgust Scale and the most commonly used 12 moral dilemmas measuring utilitarian/deontological preferences with Structural Equation Modeling. Our results indicate that of the three domains of disgust, only sexual disgust is associated with more deontological moral preferences. We also found that pathogen disgust was associated with more utilitarian preferences. Implications of the findings are discussed.

What makes people approve or condemn mind upload technology? Untangling the effects of sexual disgust, purity and science fiction familiarity

“…To this end, in Study 2 we included the Three Domain Disgust Scale (TDDS; Tybur et al, 2009), given its strong ties to biology and evolutionary psychology. Furthermore, in a recent study, Laakasuo et al (2017) showed that two of the three sub-components of TDDS are associated with deontological moral attitudes in different ways: pathogen disgust is associated with more utilitarian attitudes and sexual disgust with more deontological attitudes (whereas moral disgust was not associated with moral cognition at all; see also Laakasuo and Sundvall, 2016). Given this link between Sexual Disgust and deontological moral attitudes, we expected to find a similar link between Sexual Disgust and moral condemnation of mind upload.…”

“…Additional pilot study analyses. Laakasuo et al (2017) suggested that the PVD scale produces similar results in intergroup altruistic helping situations than the MFQ Purity sub-scale. In our exploratory analysis we entered both of the PVD sub-scales into the same analysis (see Table 1, Model 7); however neither of the PVD sub-scales were statistically significant predictors (Bs < 0.1, | t| < 1.2, ps = n.s.).…”

Moral Psychology of Nursing Robots: Humans Dislike Violations of Patient Autonomy but Like Robots Disobeying Orders

“…Generally, utilitarian moral judgments (e.g., sacrifice one to save many) are also known as consequentialist judgments, whereas deontological judgments (e.g., killing is always wrong) are also known as duty-based moral judgments. Most moral dilemmas dealing with high conflict situations (such as trolley dilemmas forcing respondents to choose who dies and who does not) pit consequentialist views against dutybased ones (Laakasuo & Sundvall, 2016;Laakasuo, Sundvall & Drosinou, 2017;Christensen & Gomila, 2012). The same themes have been investigated also in the context of business ethics (Knobe, 2003), failed and successful poisoning attempts (Young & Saxe, 2011;Study 5), as well as intentional and accidental consensual incest between siblings (Young & Saxe, 2011;Study 6).…”

“…Future studies should also look into how individual differences in, for example, personality or other psychological trait variables (e.g., Laakasuo et al 2017), influence moral judgment in the context of nursing robotics. Recent evidence has shown that individual differences in purity concerns, disgust sensitivity, and science fiction literacy predict behaviour and opinions across domains such as robot prostitution (Koverola et al, in press), sacrificial moral dilemmas (Laakasuo, Drosinou & Sundvall, 2017), or even mind upload . For example, the amount of time spent reading science fiction and getting to know its culture, strongly predicts positive attitudes towards transhumanist technologies such as mind upload.…”

Actitudes religiosas, valores y razonamiento moral prosocial en una muestra adolescente

“…En los últimos quince años, la sucesión de investigaciones sobre los fundamentos psicológicos de la moralidad ha dado lugar a una "nueva era" en el estudio de la cognición moral (OliveraLa Rosa & Rosselló, 2014;Olivera-La Rosa et al, 2016;Sinnott-Armstrong, 2008;Laakasuo, Sundvall, & Drosinou, 2017). Resulta interesante que esta corriente de investigación se haya decantado mayoritariamente por un enfoque evolucionista, en el que se enfatiza el estudio de los procesos automáticos implicados en los juicios morales.…”