The self in moral judgement: How self-affirmation affects the moral condemnation of harmless sexual taboo violations

Abstract

People frequently condemn harmless sexual taboo behaviours. Based on self-affirmation theory, we predicted that providing an opportunity to self-affirm decreases the tendency to morally condemn harmless sexual taboos. In Experiment 1, we found evidence that self-affirmation decreases the moral condemnation of harmless sexual taboos and ruled out that this was due to a decrease in how disgusting participants considered taboo acts. In Experiment 2, we replicated this effect and demonstrated the mediating role of self-directed threat emotions. These results demonstrate that the tendency to morally condemn harmless sexual taboos arises in part from the need to protect self-integrity. We discuss the implications for the role of the self and emotions in moral judgements and interventions aimed at increasing the acceptability of harmless sexual taboos.

Keywords:

• Self-affirmation
• Moral judgements
• Harmless taboo violations
• Self-threat
• Emotions

Notes

¹ For both experiments, we report how we determined our sample size, all data exclusions (if any), all manipulations and all measures in this study. Specifically, consistent with the recommendations of Simmons, Nelson, and Simonsohn (2011), we decided for Experiment 1 to recruit and run 25 participants for every condition. For Experiment 2, we then calculated the total amount of participants we needed using G-power. Based on the effect size of Experiment 1 (approximately, Cohen’s d = .70), we determined that we also needed 50 participants (25 in every condition) to reach a power of .80. No data of the participants were deleted from both data-sets, no additional variables were measured and no additional manipulations occurred. All manipulations, participants who were part of this study and variables that were measured, are therefore reported in the current study.

² The Spearman–Brown reliability statistic is preferred over both the Pearson’s correlation and Cronbach’s α for assessing the reliability of two-item scales (Eisinga, te Grotenhuis, & Pelzer, 2013).

³ The interaction effect between self-affirmation and disgust was also significant for the incest taboo. However, self-affirmed participants relied more on disgust in making a moral judgement [β = .70, t(24) = 4.62, p < .001] compared to non-affirmed participants [β = .28, t(24) = 1.39, p = .18]. This could therefore not explain the decrease in moral condemnation after self-affirmation.

⁴ Due to a technical error, the item measuring moral acceptability for the incest taboo was not measured. For this taboo, the following analyses will therefore only be performed on the item that measured how morally wrong participants considered the taboo.

⁵ One could argue that feeling dirty is conceptually linked to how disgusting participants considered the taboo act. However, when feeling dirty was removed from the self-threat scales (αs were .88 for incest taboo and .94 for bestiality taboo), the indirect effect of self-threat emotions remained significant (95% CI = [−.48, −.06] for incest taboo, 95% CI = [−.53, −.02] for bestiality taboo). This provides additional evidence that self-threat emotions, but not disgust, mediated the effect of self-affirmation on moral judgement.