Disgusting Democrats and Repulsive Republicans: Members of Political Outgroups Are Considered Physically Gross

The status of disgust as a sociomoral emotion is debated. We conducted a stringent test of whether social stimuli (specifically, political outgroup members) can elicit physical disgust, as distinct from moral or metaphorical disgust. We employed stimuli (male faces) matched on baseline disgustingness, provided other ways for participants to express negativity toward outgroup members, and used concrete self-report measures of disgust, as well as a nonverbal measure (participants' facial expressions). Across three preregistered studies (total N = 915), we found that political outgroup members are judged to be "disgusting," although this effect is generally weaker for concrete self-report measures and absent for the nonverbal measure. This suggests that social stimuli are capable of eliciting genuine physical disgust, although it is not always outwardly expressed, and the strength of this result depends on the measures employed. We discuss implications of these results for research on sociomoral emotions and American politics.

Defensive emotions and evaluative judgements: Sensitivity to anger and fear predicts moral judgements, whereas sensitivity to disgust predicts aesthetic judgements

Aesthetic and moral evaluations engage appetitive and defensive emotions. While the role played by pleasure in positive aesthetic and moral judgements has been extensively researched, little is known about how defensive emotions influence negative aesthetic and moral judgements. Specifically, it is unknown which defensive emotions such judgements tap into, and whether both kinds of judgement share a common emotional root. Here, we investigated how participants' individual sensitivity to disgust, fear, anger and sadness predicted subjective judgements of aesthetic and moral stimuli. Bayesian modelling revealed that participants who were more sensitive to anger and fear found conventional and moral transgressions more wrong. In contrast, participants who were more sensitive to disgust disliked asymmetrical geometric patterns and untidy rooms more. These findings suggest that aesthetic and moral evaluations engage multiple defensive emotions, not just disgust, and that they may rely on different defensive emotions as part of their computational mechanism.

Specificity Versus Generality: A Meta-Analytic Review Of The Association Between Trait Disgust Sensitivity And Moral Judgment

Disgust seems to play an important role in moral judgment. However, it is unclear whether the role of disgust in moral judgment is limited to certain kinds of moral domains (versus many) and/or certain types of disgust (versus many). To clarify these questions, we conducted a multilevel meta-analysis ( k = 512; N = 72,443) on relations between trait disgust sensitivity and moral judgment (disgust-immorality association). Main analyses revealed a significant overall mean disgust-immorality association ( r = .23). Additionally, moderator analyses revealed significant specificity in disgust type and moral domain (grounded in Moral Foundations Theory): effects were stronger for (a) sexual disgust compared to pathogen disgust, (b) sanctity moral judgments compared to other domains of moral judgments, and (c) sexual-sanctity associations compared to other disgust type-moral domain pairings.

"False positive" emotions, responsibility, and moral character

People often feel guilt for accidents-negative events that they did not intend or have any control over. Why might this be the case? Are there reputational benefits to doing so? Across six studies, we find support for the hypothesis that observers expect "false positive" emotions from agents during a moral encounter - emotions that are not normatively appropriate for the situation but still trigger in response to that situation. For example, if a person accidentally spills coffee on someone, most normative accounts of blame would hold that the person is not blameworthy, as the spill was accidental. Self-blame (and the guilt that accompanies it) would thus be an inappropriate response. However, in Studies 1-2 we find that observers rate an agent who feels guilt, compared to an agent who feels no guilt, as a better person, as less blameworthy for the accident, and as less likely to commit moral offenses. These attributions of moral character extend to other moral emotions like gratitude, but not to nonmoral emotions like fear, and are not driven by perceived differences in overall emotionality (Study 3). In Study 4, we demonstrate that agents who feel extremely high levels of inappropriate (false positive) guilt (e.g., agents who experience guilt but are not at all causally linked to the accident) are not perceived as having a better moral character, suggesting that merely feeling guilty is not sufficient to receive a boost in judgments of character. In Study 5, using a trust game design, we find that observers are more willing to trust others who experience false positive guilt compared to those who do not. In Study 6, we find that false positive experiences of guilt may actually be a reliable predictor of underlying moral character: self-reported predicted guilt in response to accidents negatively correlates with higher scores on a psychopathy scale.

Evaluative judgment across domains: Liking balance, contour, symmetry and complexity in melodies and visual designs

Evaluative judgment-i.e., assessing to what degree a stimulus is liked or disliked-is a fundamental aspect of cognition, facilitating comparison and choosing among alternatives, deciding, and prioritizing actions. Neuroimaging studies have shown that evaluative judgment involves the projection of sensory information to the reward circuit. To investigate whether evaluative judgments are based on modality-specific or modality-general attributes, we compared the extent to which balance, contour, symmetry, and complexity affect liking responses in the auditory and visual modalities. We found no significant correlation for any of the four attributes across sensory modalities, except for contour. This suggests that evaluative judgments primarily rely on modality-specific sensory representations elaborated in the brain's sensory cortices and relayed to the reward circuit, rather than abstract modality-general representations. The individual traits art experience, openness to experience, and desire for aesthetics were associated with the extent to which design or compositional attributes influenced liking, but inconsistently across sensory modalities and attributes, also suggesting modality-specific influences.

Gross values: Investigating the role of disgust in bioethics

What is the role of disgust in moral judgements? Previous research found that disgust increases the severity of judgments; but other more recent work has cast doubt on these findings. Here we investigate roles of induced and trait disgust on moral judgments of controversial biological and medical technologies – bioethics – an area rife with proto-typical disgust cues. Participants (N = 600) viewed disgusting, frightening, or neutral pictures, rated the moral acceptability of biotechnologies, and completed questionnaire measures of trait disgust. We found a small negative effect of induced disgust (but not fear) on the acceptability of ‘existing’ biotechnology, but not ‘future’, ‘agricultural’, or ‘termination’ biotechnologies. But this effect was too small to change pre-existing opinions and would not have survived a correction for multiple tests. Although trait disgust had mostly negative relationships with the moral acceptability of biotechnologies, it did not moderate the effect of observing disgusting photos on biotechnology judgments. The larger, more consistent effects for trait disgust suggest that either (a) measures of trait disgust and moral attitudes share a source of method variance or (b) incidental, visual manipulations are too weak to capture the true effect of disgust on moral judgments.

Infection threat shapes our social instincts

We social animals must balance the need to avoid infections with the need to interact with conspecifics. To that end we have evolved, alongside our physiological immune system, a suite of behaviors devised to deal with potentially contagious individuals. Focusing mostly on humans, the current review describes the design and biological innards of this behavioral immune system, laying out how infection threat shapes sociality and sociality shapes infection threat. The paper shows how the danger of contagion is detected and posted to the brain; how it affects individuals’ mate choice and sex life; why it strengthens ties within groups but severs those between them, leading to hostility toward anyone who looks, smells, or behaves unusually; and how it permeates the foundation of our moral and political views. This system was already in place when agriculture and animal domestication set off a massive increase in our population density, personal connections, and interaction with other species, amplifying enormously the spread of disease. Alas, pandemics such as COVID-19 not only are a disaster for public health, but, by rousing millions of behavioral immune systems, could prove a threat to harmonious cohabitation too.

Direct and indirect punishment of norm violations in daily life

Across societies, humans punish norm violations. To date, research on the antecedents and consequences of punishment has largely relied upon agent-based modeling and laboratory experiments. Here, we report a longitudinal study documenting punishment responses to norm violations in daily life (k = 1507; N = 257) and test pre-registered hypotheses about the antecedents of direct punishment (i.e., confrontation) and indirect punishment (i.e., gossip and social exclusion). We find that people use confrontation versus gossip in a context-sensitive manner. Confrontation is more likely when punishers have been personally victimized, have more power, and value offenders more. Gossip is more likely when norm violations are severe and when punishers have less power, value offenders less, and experience disgust. Findings reveal a complex punishment psychology that weighs the benefits of adjusting others' behavior against the risks of retaliation.

Folk beliefs about the relationships anger and disgust have with moral disapproval

Theories that view emotions as being related in some way to moral judgments suggest that condemning moral emotions should, at a minimum, be understood by laypeople to coincide with judgments of moral disapproval. Seven studies (total N = 826) tested the extent to which anger and disgust align with this criterion. We observed that while anger is understood to be strongly related to moral disapproval of people's actions and character, disgust is not (Studies 1a, 1b, 2a, 2b, and 3), and that, in contexts where disgust expressions are thought to coincide somewhat with moral disapproval, part of the reason is that the expression is perceived as anger (Study 4). Expressions of sadness are also construed as communicating anger in such contexts (Study 5). We discuss our findings in terms of rethinking how we should consider disgust as a moral emotion.

Body Odor Disgust Sensitivity Predicts Moral Harshness Toward Moral Violations of Purity

Detecting pathogen threats and avoiding disease is fundamental to human survival. The behavioral immune system (BIS) framework outlines a set of psychological functions that may have evolved for this purpose. Disgust is a core emotion that plays a pivotal role in the BIS, as it activates the behavioral avoidance motives that prevent people from being in contact with pathogens. To date, there has been little agreement on how disgust sensitivity might underlie moral judgments. Here, we investigated moral violations of "purity" (assumed to elicit disgust) and violations of "harm" (assumed to elicit anger). We hypothesized that individual differences in BIS-related traits would be associated with greater disgust (vs. anger) reactivity to, and greater condemnation of Purity (vs. Harm) violations. The study was pre-registered (https://osf.io/57nm8/). Participants (N = 632) rated scenarios concerning moral wrongness or inappropriateness and regarding disgust and anger. To measure individual differences in the activation of the BIS, we used our recently developed Body Odor Disgust Scale (BODS), a BIS-related trait measure that assesses individual differences in feeling disgusted by body odors. In line with our predictions, we found that scores on the BODS relate more strongly to affective reactions to Purity, as compared to Harm, violations. In addition, BODS relates more strongly to Moral condemnation than to perceived Inappropriateness of an action, and to the condemnation of Purity violations as compared to Harm violations. These results suggest that the BIS is involved in moral judgment, although to some extent this role seems to be specific for violations of "moral purity," a response that might be rooted in disease avoidance. Data and scripts to analyze the data are available on the Open Science Framework (OSF) repository: https://osf.io/tk4x5/. Planned analyses are available at https://osf.io/x6g3u/.

Different Disgust Domains Specifically Relate to Mental and Contact Contamination Fear in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: Evidence From a Path Analytic Model in an Italian Clinical Sample

Both contact contamination (CC) and mental contamination (MC) fears-which combined represent the most common manifestation of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD)-have been widely associated with disgust propensity. However, extant research explored this relationship using measures assessing only pathogen-related disgust, not taking into account the potential role played by sexual and moral disgust, despite literature about MC suggesting that this might be particularly relevant. In Study 1, the psychometric properties of the Italian version of the Three Domains of Disgust Scale (TDDS) were assessed in a large Italian community sample. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses confirmed the three-factor structure of the TDDS. The scale also showed good internal consistency and construct validity. In Study 2, the differential patterns of relationships between CC and MC and the three disgust domains were explored in an Italian clinical OCD sample using a path analytic approach. The TDDS-Pathogen subscale was a unique predictor of CC while the TDDS-Sexual subscale was a unique predictor of MC, after controlling for anxiety and depression. Surprisingly, the TDDS-Moral subscale was not a predictor of either domain of contamination fear. Limitations and clinical implications are discussed.