Incidental disgust does not cause moral condemnation of neutral actions

ABSTRACT

Emotivism in moral psychology holds that making moral judgements is at least partly an affective process. Three emotivist hypotheses can be distinguished: the elicitation hypothesis (that moral transgressions elicit emotions); the amplification hypothesis (that disgust amplifies moral judgments); and the moralisation hypothesis (that affect moralises the non-moral). Even though the moralisation hypothesis is the strongest and most radical form of emotivism, it has not been systematically experimentally tested. Most previous studies have used as stimuli morally wrong actions, and thus they cannot answer whether disgust is sufficient to moralise an otherwise neutral action. In Experiment 1 (N = 87) we tested the effect of incidental disgust on morally neutral scenarios, and in Experiment 2 (N = 510) the differential effect of disgust on neutral and wrong scenarios. The results did not support either the moralisation or the amplification hypothesis. Instead, Bayesian analyses provided substantial evidence for the null hypothesis that incidental disgust does not affect moral ratings. The results are in line with a recent meta-analysis suggesting that disgust has no effect on moral ratings.

KEYWORDS:

• Incidental disgust
• moral judgment
• moralization hypothesis
• amplification hypothesis
• moral emotivism

Data availability statement

The data and materials that support the findings of this study are openly available in OSF at https://osf.io/wbyfu/, reference number DOI 10.17605/OSF.IO/WBYFU.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The Heinz dilemma is one of many fictitious scenarios used by Kohlberg (1981) to study the stages of moral development:

A woman was near death from a special kind of cancer. There was one drug that the doctors thought might save her. It was a form of radium that a druggist in the same town had recently discovered. The drug was expensive to make, but the druggist was charging ten times what the drug cost him to produce. He paid $200 for the radium and charged $2,000 for a small dose of the drug. The sick woman's husband, Heinz, went to everyone he knew to borrow the money, but he could only get together about $1,000 which is half of what it cost. He told the druggist that his wife was dying and asked him to sell it cheaper or let him pay later. But the druggist said: ‘No, I discovered the drug and I’m going to make money from it.’ So Heinz got desperate and broke into the man's store to steal the drug for his wife. Should Heinz have broken into the laboratory to steal the drug for his wife? Why or why not? (Kohlberg, 1981)

2 The Bayes Factor is an estimate for how many more times plausible the data is under the alternative hypothesis compared to the null hypothesis. BF above 1 indicates evidence for the alternative hypothesis, whereas BF below 1 indicates evidence for the null hypothesis. The inverted BF was used as a more intuitive measure of evidence for the null effect, because the values of the inverted BF increase as the null hypothesis receives more support. BF between 1 and 3 can be considered as weak evidence for the alternative hypothesis, 3–10 substantial, and 10–30 strong. Respective values apply with respect to the inverted BF and the null hypothesis (Jeffreys, 1961).