Moral Disgust

Moral disgust occurs when we think about moral violations committed by other people. I emphasize other people because when we commit a moral violation, typically that causes a self-conscious emotion such as shame or guilt. There is some overlap between animal-nature, interpersonal, and moral disgust. For instance, sexually inappropriate acts or stories about violent murders could elicit both moral and animal-nature disgust. In addition, moral taint is one of the eliciting events in interpersonal disgust. We may see this overlap because the four broad groups of disgust expanded over time.

Cross-cultural differences in moral disgust exist (Haidt et al., 1997). For instance, North Americans experience moral disgust when another person violates their own or others’ individual rights. Examples include when someone holds socially inappropriate attitudes or when someone violates the basic rights of others (e.g., betrayal, racism). Japanese experience moral disgust when another person fails to meet uphold the group or relationship norms. Hindu cultures experience disgust toward caste or purity violations.  For instance, marrying or working outside of one’s caste might elicit disgust in other people.  In India, a group referred to as the “untouchables” are born into the lowest caste and thus experience discrimination and hate crimes, possibly because they elicit disgust in other members of society – simply because of their caste assigned at birth.  See this National Geographic article (Mayell, 2003) for more information about the untoucables. For both cultures, moral disgust is elicited by violation of some rules or norms, but in North American the violation effects individual people, whereas in Eastern cultures the violation effects groups or relationships.

Some disagreement exists over whether moral violations by others cause moral disgust or anger. Researchers (Haidt et al., 1997; Rozin et al., 2008) who believe moral disgust is a separate emotion from anger, point out that across cultures, languages use the same word to describe both core and moral disgust (see Table 4 for examples).

Other psychologists believe that violations of immorality cause anger, and not disgust. Nabi (2002) asked participants to describe memories of times they felt “disgust,” “disgusted,” “revulsion,” “grossed out,” or “angry.” Trained coders analyzed the stories for themes of anger OR themes of disgust (see Table 5). Results showed that when participants recalled times they felt “anger,” “disgust”, and “disgusted,” a majority of the participants discussed themes of anger, not disgust. Almost all the participants who recalled times they were “grossed out” discussed themes of disgust. The word repulsion triggered themes of disgust for a majority of participants (56%), but still a large portion (44%) discussed anger themes when recalling repulsion.

Coding was conducted on the intensity of anger and disgust evident in the essays. When participants recalled a time they felt “anger” or “disgusted,” the coders concluded the essays contained more intense feelings of anger than disgust. But, when participants wrote about a time they felt “grossed out” coding revealed that participants experienced more intense disgust than anger. For terms “disgust” and “repulsed” no differences were found between intensity of anger and disgust.
After writing an essay about their assigned term, participants completed self-report measures about whether they felt like avoiding or approaching during the emotional experience (see Table 6). Avoiding examples included “feel like throwing up,” and “wanting to avoid something.” Approach examples included “feel like hitting someone,” and “wanting to overcome some obstacle.” In general, people recalling a time they were “grossed out” reported greater desire to avoid and less desire to approach compared to the other conditions. Taken together, these findings suggest that the phrase “grossed out” definitely elicits avoidance behaviors that accompany disgust. But, terms like “disgust” and “disgusted” elicit moderate levels of avoidance and approach behaviors.