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

ABSTRACT

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Anger
• disgust
• moral judgment
• emotions
• expressions

Acknowledgements

We thank Timothy Hayward, Nicholas Herzog, and Yena Kim for their assistance with this research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 We thank Roger Giner-Sorolla for pointing this out.

2 We aimed for 100 participants; however, 35 participants were excluded either because they failed the attention check questions, or they provided responses that were either nonsensical (e.g., “very good,” “no,” “over rate,” “something”) or were redescriptions of the emotions described (e.g., “Bill makes Joe feel nauseated”; “Bill does makes Joe feel irritated, frustrated”), and were therefore excluded from analysis. Two raters independently coded the responses for their suitability as sensible responses to the question (i.e., a discrete action of Bill). Agreement levels were high, Spearman’s ρ = .94, p < .001.

3 If sadness is included as a mediator in the first analysis, it does not mediate the effect of disgust on inferred disapproval, ab = .16, SE = .22, CI_95%: [−0.23, 0.60], and grossed out and anger remain significant mediators. If grossed out is included as a mediator in the second analysis, it does not mediate the effect of sadness on inferred disapproval, ab = −.04, SE = .23, CI_95%: [−0.56, 0.35], and sadness and anger remain significant mediators.