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.
Highlights
Higher disgust sensitivity predicts more conservative attitudes towards abortion and gay marriage[10], while individuals with higher disgust sensitivity have been shown to be more avoidant of moral norm violators and to judge them more harshly[11,12]
Studies examining the effects of disgust induction on utilitarian judgment have produced conflicting results[20,21,22] which could in part be due to the fact that these studies have not taken disgust sensitivity into account
Considering that individual differences in disgust sensitivity are relevant in moral judgment formation, it is surprising that the links between disgust sensitivity and utilitarian preferences have not been extensively investigated
Summary
Higher disgust sensitivity predicts more conservative attitudes towards abortion and gay marriage[10], while individuals with higher disgust sensitivity have been shown to be more avoidant of moral norm violators and to judge them more harshly[11,12]. The contradictory findings – that disgust sensitivity is linked to moral judgment but disgust primes are not – could be due to the fact that the disgust induction stimuli have led to a type of disgust less relevant for moral judgment Another possibility is that, previous studies might have systematically confounded Sexual and Pathogen Disgust[4,23,24]. As far as we are aware, this is the first study to investigate the relationship between individual differences in different components of disgust and utilitarian moral judgments with non-disgust inducing stimuli. We decided to investigate the links between Pathogen, Sexual and Moral Disgust[24] with respect to the most extensively studied moral cognitive process, that of utilitarian judgment formation. We did not not expect any other effects to emerge
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