Does Incidental Disgust Amplify Moral Judgment? A Meta-Analytic Review of Experimental Evidence

Loading...
Thumbnail Image
Penn collection
Neuroethics Publications
Degree type
Discipline
Subject
moral judgment
disgust
meta-analysis
affect
misattribution
Bioethics and Medical Ethics
Neuroscience and Neurobiology
Neurosciences
Funder
Grant number
License
Copyright date
Distributor
Related resources
Author
Landy, Justin F
Contributor
Abstract

The role of emotion in moral judgment is currently a topic of much debate in moral psychology. One specific claim made by many researchers is that irrelevant feelings of disgust can amplify the severity of moral condemnation. Numerous studies have found this effect, but there have also been several published failures to replicate this effect. Clarifying this issue would inform important theoretical debates between rival accounts of moral judgment. We meta-analyzed all available studies, published and unpublished, that experimentally manipulated incidental disgust prior to or concurrent with a moral judgment task (k = 50). We found that there is evidence for a small amplification effect of disgust (d = .11), which is strongest for gustatory/olfactory modes of disgust induction. However, there is also some suggestion of publication bias in this literature, and when this is accounted for, the effect disappears entirely (d = -.01). Moreover, prevalent confounds mean that the effect size that we estimate is best interpreted as an upper bound on the size of the amplification effect. The results of this meta-analysis argue against strong claims about the causal role of affect in moral judgment and suggest a need for new, more rigorous research on this topic.

Advisor
Date Range for Data Collection (Start Date)
Date Range for Data Collection (End Date)
Digital Object Identifier
Series name and number
Publication date
2015-07-01
Journal title
Perspectives on Psychological Science
Volume number
Issue number
Publisher
Publisher DOI
Journal Issue
Comments
Recommended citation
Collection