Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences - Theses
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ItemThe role of disgust in moral judgement( 2023-10)The emotion disgust underlies some of our moral judgments. But it’s not clear whether this relationship is because of disgust’s role in motivating the avoidance of pathogen threats (i.e., pathogen disgust) or reproductive threats (i.e., sexual disgust) (or both). The present thesis systematically examines the respective role of pathogen and sexual disgust in moral judgment across three empirical chapters. Chapter 2 (published in the journal Emotion Review; N = 72,443), was a systematic review and meta-analysis on associations between trait disgust sensitivity and moral judgments (as per Moral Foundations Theory; Graham et al., 2013). The key finding from this investigation was that measures of trait sexual disgust were more strongly related to moral judgments (especially of the sanctity domain) than were measures of trait pathogen disgust. Building on Chapter 2’s findings, Chapter 3 (published in the journal Emotion) aimed to clarify the zero-order effects of the meta-analysis by investigating the unique (semi-partial) contribution of each disgust type on moral judgment. In two studies (N = 2,718), comprised of 10 samples (taken from Australia, the United States, and Brazil), it was found that the unique associations between trait sexual disgust and sanctity/binding moral judgments were strong and significant, whereas the unique associations between trait pathogen disgust and sanctity/binding moral judgments were weak and non-significant. Moreover, the sexual disgust-sanctity/binding association seemed to be explained by motivations to avoid promiscuous sex (a specific kind of reproductive threat that triggers sexual disgust). Together, the findings from Chapters 2 and 3 argue against popular pathogen avoidance explanations of the connection between disgust and sanctity/binding concerns, and instead argue in favor sexual avoidance explanations (e.g., promiscuity avoidance). Chapter 4 moves away from an individual differences approach and adopts an experimental approach to investigate whether inducing state sexual disgust would have a causal impact on moral judgments across two studies (N = 1,290). Although the sexual disgust induction was successful at inducing disgust in both experiments, the induction had no direct causal impact on moral judgments (compared to a control condition) in either experiment. Nevertheless, consistent with the previous two chapters, trait sexual disgust was uniquely and reliably associated with sanctity/binding moral judgments in both experiments. Inconsistencies between trait and state sexual disgust findings might be due to limitations of the experiments or because trait and state approaches test a different underlying process. In summary, the present thesis shows that sexual disgust is an important factor in moral judgments.