Disgust makes us condemn unrelated transgressions - when they are far away

What is it about?

This research shows that when we feel physically disgusted, for instance because we think about vomit or body odor, we are as a result more likely to condemn moral transgressions that are completely unrelated to the experience of disgust, such as when we read about stealing or harming of innocent people in the newspaper. We show that this effect of disgust on judgments of unrelated moral transgressions is pronounced most for transgressions that are far away from us, rather than near, in time or space.

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Why is it important?

A large number of prior studies have shown that our moral judgment is not only based on conscious, controlled reasoning processes but also by processes that we cannot control easily, such as an emotion that we happen to feel. Some research has shown that feeling disgusted makes us judge an unrelated transgression more harshly. However, other studies have failed to find this effect. Moreover, it is not clear exactly why disgust would have this effect. Our findings support the idea that disgust evolved as a pathogen avoidance mechanism that, over the course of human evolution also acquired the function to signal and avoid threats to the social order (i.e., moral violations). In ancestral environments, pathogen sources were more likely to be psychologically distant than close. For instance, interaction with psychologically close others (e.g., those belonging to one’s family group) likely posed less risk of contagion than interaction with psychologically distant others (e.g., strangers) who may host novel pathogens to which one has no immunity. In addition to providing empirical evidence supportive of this pathogen avoidance account of the origin of disgust, we identify practically relevant instances when disgust is more (vs. less) likely to influence moral judgment. For instance, disgust is more likely to influence our judgment of a cheating politician than our judgment of a cheating spouse.

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