Disgust

Disgust

Wikipedia:

Moral judgments can be traditionally defined or thought of as directed by standards such as impartiality and respect towards others for their well-being. From more recent theoretical and empirical information, it can be suggested that morality may be guided by basic affective processes. Jonathan Haidt proposed that one's instant judgments about morality are experienced as a "flash of intuition" and that these affective perceptions operate rapidly, associatively, and outside of consciousness.[53] From this, moral intuitions are believed to be stimulated prior to conscious moral cognitions which correlates with having a greater influence on moral judgments.[53]

Research suggests that the experience of disgust can alter moral judgments. Many studies have focused on the average change in behavior across participants, with some studies indicating disgust stimuli intensifies the severity of moral judgments.[54] However, additional studies have found the reverse effect,[55] and recent studies have suggested that the average effect of disgust on moral judgments is small or absent.[56][57] Potentially reconciling these effects, a study recently indicated that the direction and size of the effect of disgust stimuli on moral judgment depends upon an individual's sensitivity to disgust.[58]

The effect also seems to be limited to a certain aspect of morality. Horberg et al. found that disgust plays a role in the development and intensification of moral judgments of purity in particular.[59] In other words, the feeling of disgust is often associated with a feeling that some image of what is pure has been violated. For example, a vegetarian might feel disgust after seeing another person eating meat because he/she has a view of vegetarianism as the pure state-of-being. When this state-of-being is violated, the vegetarian feels disgust. Furthermore, disgust appears to be uniquely associated with purity judgments, not with what is just/unjust or what is harmful/caregiving, while other emotions such as fear, anger, and sadness are "unrelated to moral judgments of purity".[60]

Some other research suggests that an individual's level of disgust sensitivity is due to their particular experience of disgust.[53] One's disgust sensitivity can be either high or low. The higher one's disgust sensitivity is, the greater the tendency to make stricter moral judgments.[53] Disgust sensitivity can also relate to various aspects of moral values, which can have a negative or positive impact. For example, Disgust sensitivity is associated with moral hypervigilance, which means people who have higher disgust sensitivity are more likely to think that other people who are suspects of a crime are more guilty. They also associate them as being morally evil and criminal, thus endorsing them to harsher punishment in the setting of a court.

Disgust is also theorized as an evaluative emotion that can control moral behavior.[53] When one experiences disgust, this emotion might signal that certain behaviors, objects, or people are to be avoided in order to preserve their purity. Research has established that when the idea or concept of cleanliness is made salient then people make less severe moral judgments of others.[53] From this particular finding, it can be suggested that this reduces the experience of disgust and the ensuing threat of psychological impurity diminishes the apparent severity of moral transgressions.[61]

According to the book The Hydra's Tale: Imagining Disgust by Robert Rawdon Wilson,[67] disgust may be further subdivided into physical disgust, associated with physical or metaphorical uncleanliness, and moral disgust, a similar feeling related to courses of action. For example; "I am disgusted by the hurtful things that you are saying." Moral disgust should be understood as culturally determined; physical disgust as more universally grounded. The book also discusses moral disgust as an aspect of the representation of disgust. Wilson does this in two ways. First, he discusses representations of disgust in literature, film and fine art. Since there are characteristic facial expressions (the clenched nostrils, the pursed lips)—as Charles Darwin, Paul Ekman, and others have shown—they may be represented with more or less skill in any set of circumstances imaginable. There may even be "disgust worlds" in which disgust motifs so dominate that it may seem that entire represented world is, in itself, disgusting. Second, since people know what disgust is as a primary, or visceral, emotion (with characteristic gestures and expressions), they may imitate it. Thus, Wilson argues that, for example, contempt is acted out on the basis of the visceral emotion, disgust, but is not identical with disgust. It is a "compound affect" that entails intellectual preparation, or formatting, and theatrical techniques. Wilson argues that there are many such "intellectual" compound affects—such as nostalgia and outrage—but that disgust is a fundamental and unmistakable example. Moral disgust, then, is different from visceral disgust; it is more conscious and more layered in performance.

Wilson links shame and guilt to disgust (now transformed, wholly or partially, into self-disgust) primarily as a consequence rooted in self-consciousness. Referring to a passage in Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook, Wilson writes that "the dance between disgust and shame takes place. A slow choreography unfolds before the mind's-eye."[68]