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  • Landy&Piazza SPPS accepted author copy

    Rights statement: The final, definitive version of this article has been published in the Journal, Social Psychological and Personality Science, 10 (2), 2019, © SAGE Publications Ltd, 2019 by SAGE Publications Ltd at the Social Psychological and Personality Science page: http://journals.sagepub.com/home/spp on SAGE Journals Online: http://journals.sagepub.com/

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Re-evaluating moral disgust: Sensitivity to many affective states predicts extremity in many evaluative judgments

Research output: Contribution to Journal/MagazineJournal articlepeer-review

Published
<mark>Journal publication date</mark>1/03/2019
<mark>Journal</mark>Social Psychological and Personality Science
Issue number2
Volume10
Number of pages9
Pages (from-to)211-219
Publication StatusPublished
Early online date30/11/17
<mark>Original language</mark>English

Abstract

Disgust-sensitive individuals are particularly morally critical. Some theorists take this as evidence that disgust has a uniquely moral form: disgust contributes to moralization even of pathogen-free violations, and disgust’s contribution to moralization is unique from other emotional states. We argue that the relationship between disgust sensitivity (DS) and moral judgment is not special in two respects. First, trait sensitivity to many other affective states, beyond disgust, predicts moral evaluations. Second, DS also predicts nonnormative evaluative judgments. Four studies supported these hypotheses, using multiple measures of DS, and judgments of moral violations (Studies 1 and 4), conventional violations (Study 1), imprudent actions (Study 1), competence (Study 2), and aesthetic evaluations (Study 3). Our findings call into question the usefulness of “moral disgust” as a psychological construct by showing that the relationship between DS and moral condemnation is one instantiation of a more general association between affect and judgment.

Bibliographic note

The final, definitive version of this article has been published in the Journal, Social Psychological and Personality Science, 10 (2), 2019, © SAGE Publications Ltd, 2019 by SAGE Publications Ltd at the Social Psychological and Personality Science page: http://journals.sagepub.com/home/spp on SAGE Journals Online: http://journals.sagepub.com/