engleski

The relation of disgust and morality while controlling for other emotions

The debate on the role of the emotion of disgust in moral reasoning is a prevalent topic. While some see disgust only as avoidance mechanism toward pathogen infection, others believe it evolved in the domain of moral reasoning. On the assumptions that anti-social violations lead to avoidance of violators through disgust activation, Tybur et al. (2009) created a moral subscale of The Three Domains of Disgust Scale (TDDS). According to authors people report disgust when social norms are violated and relate it to morality violations. Our aim was to check is the relation between disgust and immorality present for this subscale and does it hold when the influence of other affective states is regressed out. It is known that negative-valence states (anger, sadness, fear, repulsion, contempt) influence estimates of immorality and it has also been shown that disgust ratings on this subscale can be affected by anger and general unpleasantness, questioning its construct validity. We hypothesized that controlling for negative-valence states, disgust will not be a predictor of immorality. Alternatively, if moral disgust is a valid construct it should be a predictor of immorality. Paper-pencil research was carried out on 84 female students of psychology. Two blocks of six statements were used. One block consisted of moral subscale items, while the other block consisted of counterpart statements (e.g. “Deceiving your friend” vs “Helping your friend“). This was made to check if moral statements indeed measure immoral acts. The order of blocks was counterbalanced. For each statement participants had to rate disgust as well as other emotional reactions (repulsion, contempt, fear, sadness, anger, happiness) and immorality from the perspective of the agent. Half of the participants rated emotional reactions first, while the other half rated immorality first. The results showed immorality was related to disgust, anger, repulsion, and fear (r(82)=.24-.27, p<.05), while the correlation of immorality and happiness was negative (r(82)=-.37, p<.01). Disgust was highly related with anger, sadness, repulsion, and contempt (r(82)=.59-.83, p<.01). Regression analysis shows that the relation between disgust and immorality does not remain after controlling for the other emotions (β=.17, p>.05). Because of collinearity issues multiple regression estimates for immorality predictions were unreliable. We conclude that for this scale the construct of disgust could be an artefact of overlapping with other negative-valence states and not a valid predictor of immorality.

the three domains of disgust scale, moral disgust, morality judgments

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