
Neuroethics Publications
Title
Does Incidental Disgust Amplify Moral Judgment? A Meta-Analytic Review of Experimental Evidence
Document Type
Journal Article
Date of this Version
7-2015
Publication Source
Perspectives on Psychological Science
Volume
10
Issue
4
Start Page
518
Last Page
536
DOI
10.1177/1745691615583128
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 We meta-analyzed all available studies, published and unpublished, that experimentally manipulated incidental disgust prior to or concurrent with a moral judgment task (k = 50).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.
Keywords
moral judgment, disgust, meta-analysis, affect, misattribution
Recommended Citation
Landy, J. F., & Goodwin, G. P. (2015). Does Incidental Disgust Amplify Moral Judgment? A Meta-Analytic Review of Experimental Evidence. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 10 (4), 518-536. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1745691615583128
Included in
Bioethics and Medical Ethics Commons, Neuroscience and Neurobiology Commons, Neurosciences Commons
Date Posted: 19 June 2015
This document has been peer reviewed.