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/
Accepted author manuscript, 4.68 MB, PDF document
Available under license: CC BY-NC: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Final published version
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
}
TY - JOUR
T1 - Re-evaluating moral disgust
T2 - Sensitivity to many affective states predicts extremity in many evaluative judgments
AU - Landy, Justin
AU - Piazza, Jared Raymond
N1 - 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/
PY - 2019/3/1
Y1 - 2019/3/1
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - disgust sensitivity
KW - emotion
KW - moral judgment
KW - aesthetic judgment
KW - affect as information
U2 - 10.1177/1948550617736110
DO - 10.1177/1948550617736110
M3 - Journal article
VL - 10
SP - 211
EP - 219
JO - Social Psychological and Personality Science
JF - Social Psychological and Personality Science
SN - 1948-5506
IS - 2
ER -