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Running Head: THE WORD MORAL
CAD Revisited:
Effects of the Word “Moral” on the Moral Relevance of Disgust (and Other Emotions)
THE WORD MORAL
Abstract
The CAD model posits a mapping of contempt, anger, and disgust onto the moral codes of
community, autonomy, and divinity (respectively). A recent study by Hutcherson and Gross
[Hutcherson, C.A. & Gross, J.J. (2011). The moral emotions: A social-functionalist account
of anger, disgust, and contempt. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,100,719-737]
posited moral disgust as the dominant other-condemning emotion across all three moral
codes. However, the methodology used may have incidentally increased the relevance of
disgust. In the current experiment, one condition repeated Hutcherson and Gross’ procedure,
while in another condition we added the word “moral” to three other emotions. Consistent
with CAD, anger had the highest intensity ratings in response to autonomy violations,
whereas “grossed out” was the dominant response to divinity violations. Furthermore, the
adjective “moral” increased the relevance of anger, contempt, and fear in irrelevant domains,
which suggests that the adjective "moral" increases any emotion’s moral relevance.
Keywords: disgust, anger, contempt, moral, CAD
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CAD Revisited:
Effects of the Word “Moral” on the Moral Relevance of Disgust (and Other Emotions)
Recent research has emphasized the role that emotions play in our moral judgments. It
has been suggested that emotions often guide our approval or condemnation for the actions of
others (Greene, Sommerville, Nystrom, Darley, & Cohen, 2001; Haidt, 2001; Prinz, 2007;
Rozin, Lowery, Imada, & Haidt, 1999; Schnall, Haidt, Clore, & Jordan, 2008; Wheatley &
Haidt, 2005). TIn particular, the moral emotion of disgust has attracted a large amount of
research attention. ResearchersIn particular, researchers have proposed different theories of
the role that disgust plays in morality, as distinct from anger and contempt. However, to date
it is difficult to bring understanding to this research field because these morally-condemning
emotions have been measured using different methodology. Therefore, the literature to date
leaves open the questions of how we should define moral disgust, and what measures should
be used to study it to study this moral emotion. The current research has implications for both
of these essential questions.
The CAD hypothesis suggests that disgust plays a unique role in morality (Rozin et
al., 1999). It proposes that the “other-condemning” moral emotions of contempt, anger, and
disgust correspond to violations of three distinct moral codes, proposed by Shweder, Much,
Mahapatra, and Park (1997)—with contempt corresponding to violations of community
violations (or the duties and obligations of a social role or class); anger corresponding to
violations of autonomy violations (or the rights of an individual), and disgust corresponding
to violations of divinity violations (or the religious and natural order). In the initial tests of the
CAD model, Rozin et al. had American and Japanese students indicate how much they would
feel anger, disgust, and contempt towards 46 immoral acts, each related to one of the three
moral codes. The results were generally supportedtive of the proposed mapping between the
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other-condemning emotions and the three moral domains. The only exception was that the
mapping of contempt- to community associationviolations was relatively weaker than anger-
autonomy and disgust-divinity. A particular strength of this research is that it used both
emotion words and facial emotion displays to measure anger, disgust, and contempt. This
method is useful because previous research has found that the semantic terms “anger” and
“disgust” are frequently correlated and often used interchangeably (Johnson-Laird & Oatley,
1989; J. A. Russell & Fehr, 1994; Shaver, Schwartz, Kirson, & O'Connor, 1987).
Additionally, Ekman, O’Sullivan, and Matsumoto (1991) have argued that individuals cannot
reliably label contempt because English speakers often do not know what the term means.
Indeed, when assessed via open choice, subjects do not reliably label the contempt expression
as “contempt” (Wagner, 2000).
However, other research has put forth the statedargument that disgust is sovereign to
all kinds of immoral acts, not just limited to divinity violations (Hutcherson & Gross, 2011;
cf. Rozin, Haidt, & McCauley, 1993; Haidt, Rozin, MacCauley & Imada, 1997). Research by
Hutcherson and Gross (2011) has endeavored to determine whether moral disgust is the
predominant response to all three CAD domainsmoral codes. In Study 1 they researchers
replicated and extended studies by Rozin et al. (1999), however, they only used emotion
words. They sought to make clear to participants a distinction between moral and non-moral
disgust by affixing the term “moral” to disgust, and by giving participants thean alternative
emotion term “grossed out” as an option for non-moral disgust. These researchers predicted
that participants would have a preference for moral disgust as their emotional response
toward all three CAD violations, in comparison to other moral (anger, contempt) and non-
moral emotions (sadness, fear/anxiety, and grossed out). TIndeed, they found that moral
disgust was experienced more intensely than any other emotion in response to both
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community and autonomy violations, though not divinity violations (which elicited both
moral and non-moral disgust).
It was admirable that this research tried to distinguish different forms of disgust.
However, one limitation of their approach was that by affixing the term “moral” to the
emotion “disgust,” while omitting “moral” from all the other emotions, they authors might
have incidentally increased the relevance of this combined “moral + disgust” term as a
response to all moral violations. In other words, the preferential selection of the item “moral
disgust” as a response to autonomy and community violations may simply be an artefact of
the suitability of the word “moral” to a moral context. Thus, the term “moral disgust” may
not capture a distinct type of disgust, but is simply perceived as a suitable response to all
moral violations because of the moral connotation.
In the present study, we sought to examine whether the word “moral” influences the
relevance of emotion terms to the three CAD domains. Specifically, we sought to determine
if adding the term “moral” to the other CAD emotions of anger and contempt—or even to a
non-moral negative emotion such as fear—would influence the intensity and preference for
these emotions as suitable responses to the three CAD domainsmoral violations. We
hypothesized that simply adding the word “moral” to emotions (, such as anger, contempt,
and fear), would increase their judged relevance to any moral violation. Furthermore, we
reasoned that if this effect reflects a semantic artefact rather than a genuine expression of a
morally relevant emotion, and the CAD model is overall valid, then the effect of adding the
word “moral” should be particularly strong in emotion-domain combinations where the CAD
model predicts the emotion should be less relevant (that is, community and divinity for anger,
autonomy and divinity for contempt, and all domains for fear).
To test our hypothesis, the present experiment we present here includes a duplicate of
Hutcherson and Gross’ (2011) Study 1 as a control condition, and a comparison condition in
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which, in addition to the term “moral disgust,” the word “moral” was affixed to the other-
condemning moral emotions of anger and contempt, and. In this other condition we also
added “moral” to the emotion of al term “fear/anxiety”, which is normally classed as a non-
moral emotionnot usually classed among the morally relevant emotions (e.g., see Haidt,
2003).
We reasoned that the adjective “moral” itself would increase the perceived relevance
of the non-disgust emotion terms as moral responses. However, even with the word “moral”
added to these terms, we did not expect these terms to eclipse the relevance of non-moral
disgust (i.e., “grossed out”) as the dominant response to divinity violations, given research
that suggests disgust is the prototypical emotional response to violations of this type (see
Gutierrez, Giner-Sorolla, & Vasiljevic, in press; Horberg, Oveis, Keltner, & Cohen, 2009; P.
S. Russell & Giner-Sorolla, 2011a, b, c). Additionally, consistent with the CAD perspective
and other research indicating strong links between anger and harm/injustice (e.g., Lerner,
Goldberg, & Tetlock, 1998; Miller, 2001), we expected that anger would beemerge as the
most relevant emotion for autonomy violations. Finally, we reserved making a hypothesis
regarding community violations, as findings on this emotion/domain have been less
consistent.
Method
Participants
Participants were 245 adults (128 male, 116 female, 1 did not disclose) who
participated via the Mechanical Turk online job service in exchange for compensation.
Mechanical Turk was used to recruit a more diverse samplesample of participants (in terms
of gender, age, ethnicity, and education) than generally obtained via university samples (see
Buhrmester, Kwang, & Gosling, 2011). The mean age of the sample was 31.11 years (SD =
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11.70). NThe nationalities werey of the sample was 58.4% United States, 29.4% Indian, and
12.2% other nationalities. EThe ethnicity of the sample was fairly diverse: 54.3%
White/Caucasian, 35.5% Asian, 3.7% Latin American/Hispanic, 3.7% Black/African
American/African Caribbean, and 2.9% mixed or other ethnicity.
Design
We used a single factor (pure replication vs. moral version) between-subjects design.
The between-subjects variable was whether the word “moral” was affixed to the emotion
terms anger, contempt, and fear/anxiety (i.e., “moral anger”, “moral contempt”, “moral
fear/anxiety”) or not. IThus, in the pure replication (n = 111), participants were provided the
following emotion labels: anger, contempt, moral disgust, sadness, fear/anxiety, and grossed
out. In the moral version (n = 134), the choices were: moral anger, moral contempt, moral
disgust, sadness, moral fear/anxiety, and grossed out.
Materials and procedure
WeOur materials and procedures were modeled our study after Hutcherson and
Gross’s Study 1 (2011, Study 1), with only a few amendments. First, Hutcherson and Gross
(2011) included only two divinity vignettes, though they included nine autonomy and 12
community vignettes. We agree with Hutcherson and Gross that many of the actions offered
by Rozin et al. (1999) as divinity violations do not qualify as moral transgressions (e.g.,
eating rotten meat), but we thought the scarcity of divinity items presented a methodological
limitation. Thus, we adapted four items from Graham, Haidt, and Nosek (2009), which they
used to assess attitudes towards “purity” violations (a reconceptualization of the CAD
divinity category). These items were: (a) someone gets plastic surgery done that adds a 2-inch
tail on the end of their spine; (b) someone cooks and eats their pet dog, after it dies of natural
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causes; (c) a dance group performs an art piece in which all participants act like animals for
30 minutes, including crawling around naked and urinating on stage; and (d) a man goes to
the supermarket once a week and buys a dead chicken, but before cooking the chicken, he has
sexual intercourse with it. Though it could be argued these acts have no direct consequences
for people other than the actors themselves, and thus do not represent “moral” actions,
Graham et al. (2009) have found that some people do treat these actions as moral violations—
that is, they believe the acts are punishable, universally wrong, and are extremely reluctant to
engage in these actions (see also Nichols, 2002, for similar argument about disgusting acts).
Thus, in all, we had six divinity items and 27 total violations.
Second, vignettesmoral violations were presented in the random order used by Rozin
et al. (1999), —mixing items from different groups—as opposed to grouping items together
by violation type. This was done to avoid participants perceiving any conceptual connections
between the items, and thus treating them uniformly by CAD domain. In Hutcherson and
Gross (2011), unlike the original Rozin et al. (1999) study, vignettes were presented in
blocks, with the autonomy violations first, followed by community and then divinity
violations (C. Hutcherson, personal communication, June 8 2011). Participants may have thus
selected “moral disgust” most strongly for autonomy violations because they had not seen
any divinity violations yet, and wanted to express their moral disapproval using any emotion
of condemnation with “moral” attached to it. However, if scenarios had been presented in a
random or varied order, the greater applicability of moral disgust to divinity violations, and
anger to autonomy violations, might have become more evident. We therefore presented
scenarios in a mixed order in our study.
Lastly, and most importantly, we included a second condition in which other
emotions, including anger, contempt, and fear/anxiety, received the adjective “moral”, in
addition to “moral” disgust, which appeared as an item across conditions. Participants were
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given the same written instructions provided by Hutcherson and Gross (2011,; see Study 1).
For each violation, participants made two different ratings. First, they were instructed to
indicate how much of each of the emotions listed they would feel at toward the actions/events
described, on a scale from 0 (not at all) to 5 (extremely). Secondly, they were instructed to
select the emotion that best described their overall reaction to the action/event from the six
options provided. Upon completion of the task, participants were debriefed and compensated.
Results
Main analyses
Emotional intensity ratings were aggregated by CAD violation type , producing
separate means for autonomy, community, and divinity violations (see Table 1 for means and
standard deviations as a function of condition). Following Hutcherson and Gross, we
conducted paired t tests on emotional intensity ratings for all 15 combinations of emotion
pairs, reporting significant differences below a threshold of p < .003, the Bonferroni-
corrected alpha level for 15 comparisons (.05/15). We conducted this analysis both on the
entire sample and with participants with a self-reported U.S. nationality only. The results
were almost identical; thus, we report here the results for the entire sample. We also report
the frequency with which each emotion was selected as the best descriptive term (see Table 2
for frequencies and percentages as a function of condition and violation type). Though there
were a few main effects of gender on emotion intensity, particularly indicating that women
(M = 4.92, SD = 1.05) more than men (M = 4.38, SD = 1.04) were grossed out by divinity
violations, F(1, 240) = 16.04, p < .001, and men (M = 2.63, SD = 1.43) more than women (M
= 1.92, SD = 1.22) were grossed out by community violations, F(1, 240) = 17.02, p < .001,
there were no interactions at all between gender and condition. We therefore report the results
collapsing across gender, similar to Hutcherson and Gross. Finally, we conducted a one-way
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MANOVA of condition on emotion intensity ratings for autonomy, community, and divinity
violations to test the effects of the word “moral” on these ratings.
[Insert Tables 1 and 2 about here]
Across the nine autonomy violations and in both conditions, anger was given the
highest mean intensity rating, compared to the other emotions (see Table 1), consistent with
the CAD model. Moreover, anger received significantly higher intensity ratings than all other
emotions in both conditions. Moral disgust received the second highest intensity ratings, but
only significantly higher intensity ratings than contempt in the pure replication (i.e., moral
disgust and moral contempt were rated equally intense in the moral version). Sadness, fear,
and grossed out were rated significantly lower than the other emotions in both conditions.
Consistent with the intensity ratings, anger was selected as the best descriptive emotion for
autonomy violations in both conditions. Analysis of the effects of condition within autonomy
violations revealed an increased preference for the emotions contempt, F(1, 243) = 5.11, p
< .03, and fear/anxiety¸ F(1, 243) = 14.59, p < .001, simply due to affixing the word “moral”
to these terms. Sadness was also chosen to a greater extent in the moral version, compared to
the pure replication, F(1, 243) = 5.78, p < .02, though it did not receive the “moral” affixture
(all other ps > .10).
Across the 12 community violations, anger was given the highest intensity ratings
above all other emotions. However, in neither condition was anger rated significantly higher
than moral disgust, and in the moral version, moral contempt was rated on par with moral
anger, moral disgust, and sadness. Again, grossed out and fear were rated significantly lower
than the other emotions, in both versions. Consistent with the intensity ratings, anger was
selected as the best descriptive emotion for this domain in the pure replication. However, in
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the moral version, the non-moral emotion of sadness was selected as the best descriptive
emotion for community violations. Nevertheless, moral anger and moral contempt were also
selected at a fairly high rate. Regarding the effects of the word “moral” for community
violations, there was an increased preference for moral fear/anxiety than for non-moral
fear/anxiety, F(1, 243) = 7.67, p < .01. No other emotion differed in this group due to
condition, ps > .10.
Across the six divinity violations, as expected, grossed out (i.e., non-moral disgust)
was given the highest intensity ratings above all other emotions. However, in both conditions,
it was not rated significantly higher than moral disgust. This is most likely due to participants
treating grossed out and moral disgust as a single construct (see factor analysis below).
Across conditions, anger, contempt, sadness, and fear were rated significantly lower than
moral and non-moral disgust in this domain. Consistent with emotion intensity ratings,
grossed out was rated the best descriptive emotion for this domain, though moral disgust was
also highly rated. Finally, regarding the effects of condition for divinity violations, there was
an increased preference for moral anger compared to anger, F(1, 243) = 4.66, p < .04, moral
contempt compared to contempt, F(1, 243) = 5.15, p < .03, and moral fear/anxiety compared
to fear/anxiety, F(1, 243) = 8.41, p < .01, in this domain. No other significant differences
were observed in this group due to condition, ps > .12.
Emotion factors emerging in each CAD domain
To test the assumption that participants treated moral and non-moral disgust as one
construct in the divinity domain, we conducted three one factor analyses analysis (with
Varimax rotation) to assess the emotion factors for each moral domain (autonomy,
community, divinity). We used parallel analysis (O’Connor, 2000) as our extraction method.
The factor structures were identical across condition (i.e., replication and moral version);
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thus, here we report the results collapsing across condition. One thousand random datasets
were created, each of which had 245 cases and six variables. In 95% of the randomly
generated datasets, the first three eigenvalues were 1.21, 1.11, and 1.03. Only eigenvalues
exceeding those derived by chance were retained. For autonomy violations, we obtained a
two-factor solution (eigenvalues = 3.40, 1.33), accounting for 78.8% of the total variance.
Anger, contempt, and moral disgust loaded to the first factor; grossed out, fear, and sadness
loaded to the second factor. For community violations, a single factor was obtained
(eigenvalue = 4.67), accounting for 77.8% of the total variance, with all six emotions loading
together above .84. For divinity violations, the predicted two-factor solution was obtained
(eigenvalues = 3.60, 1.13), accounting for 78.9% of the total variance. Fear, sadness, anger,
and contempt loaded to one factor, while grossed out and moral disgust loaded to another.
Thus, of all the emotions, moral disgust had the most ambivalent loading: loading with anger
and contempt when for participants evaluated autonomy violations; loading with all the other
emotions fori n relation to community violations; and loading with grossed out for divinity
violations. This supports the contention that the term “disgust,” even when clarified as “moral
disgust”, has different meanings to people depending on the moral context.
Discussion
In the present study, we found that one consequence of affixing the word “moral” to a
moral emotion term—including anger, contempt, and disgust—is to increases the emotion’s
perceived relevance as a response to a moral transgression. Moreover, we also found that the
addition of the word “moral” can even increase the relevance of a negative non-moral
emotion not usually classified as moral in nature (fear/anxiety). Consistent with our
predictions and the CAD model, yet less consistent with the findings of Hutcherson and
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Gross’ findings, for violations of autonomy, anger had the highest intensity ratings and was
selected as most relevant emotion across conditions (i.e., in both the pure replication and the
moral version). Adding the word “moral” to contempt in our study increased its intensity in
the autonomy domain on par with moral disgust. Also consistent with predictions and the
CAD model and somewhat consistent with Hutcherson and Gross, for divinity violations,
grossed out (i.e., non-moral disgust) hadwas given the highest intensity ratings and was
selected as the best descriptive emotion across conditions, though moral disgust was also
highly relevant. However, the relevance of moral disgust for divinity violations can be
attributed to participants treating the moral and non-moral disgust as a single construct in this
domain, as confirmed by factor analysis.
The factor analysis further revealed context effects of the CAD domains on the
meaning of the term “moral disgust.” In response to divinity violations, moral and non-moral
disgust loaded onto a single construct. This was not the casetrue for other types of violations;,
for example, moral disgust loaded with anger and contempt in the autonomy domain, separate
from non-moral disgust. This finding is consistent withsupports the idea that the word
“disgust” signifies a state closer to anger, when applied to autonomy violations (e.g., see
Bloom, 2004), and the addition of the word “moral” seems to only enhance the use of this
metaphor. This reinforces other findings that disgust language is most separate from anger
when reacting to bodily violationsdivinity violations, e.g., a sexual or eating moral norm
(Gutierrez, Giner-Sorolla, & Vasiljevic, in press; P.S. Russell & Giner-Sorolla, 2011a, b, c).
In the context of non-bodily violationsautonomy violations, e. g. of harm or fairness norms,
these studies showed that the expression “moral disgust” is was more strongly related to
anger than to non-moral disgust.
Results for community violations were less conclusive. Contrary to both the CAD
model and Hutcherson and Gross’ findings, across conditionsin community violations had
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anger was the most strongly felt emotion, and anger was selected as the best descriptive
emotion in the pure replication. In the moral version, sadness (a non-moral emotion) was
selected as the most relevant emotion to community violations. OThus, overall our results
support at least the “AD” mappings of the CAD model, while further demonstrating the
inconsistent nature of the “C” mapping. We suspect that sadness was selected as the best
descriptive emotion forwas related to community violations in the moral version of the study
because community violations tend to be viewed as less serious offenses than autonomy and
divinity violations (see Rozin et al., 1999). Many of our participants may not have considered
community violations as serious as the other moral offenses, as shown by their generally
lower negative emotion means in our study. This may explain why they found the only non-
moral, non-disgust emotion as the best descriptive emotion in this case—they were searching
for an emotion category that would not connote express strong moral condemnation, and
sadness was the only option available to them. This rationale is supported by the fact
thatSupporting this explanation, anger was selected as the best descriptive emotion for this
domain in the pure replication condition (i.e., when other negative emotions without the term
“moral” were available), but not the moral version. These finding also suggests a limitation of
the original CAD studies (Rozin et al., 1999), which did not provide participants with a non-
moral, negative emotion option.
In Hutcherson and Gross’s study, and contrasting withunlike previous research, moral
disgust was rated significantly higher than anger for autonomy violations, though anger was
rated quite high as well. However, in this experiment we found that anger was the dominant
response to autonomy violations, thus, replicating Rozin et al.’s (1999) original finding. TA
plausible reason for this may have to do with the different characters ofdifferences between
our samples. We used an older non-university sample, whereas Hutcherson and Gross used a
younger university sample. It may be that college students are more flexible with their use of
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the term “disgust” when responding to autonomy violations, whereas non-students prefer
anger as their prototype moral emotion in this domain. Perhaps educational level or English-
language proficiency influences whether anger or moral disgust is preferred as a n emotional
response to autonomy violations. Though we did not collect this demographic information in
our researchstudy, a recent study of 1,000 MTurk workers suggests showed that both
Americans and Indians workers are likely to have at least a college-level education (Ipeirotis,
2010). This suggests that our MTurk sample, which was comprised of mainly American and
Indian workers, may not be very different from Hutcherson and Gross’s sample in terms of
educational level. Furthermore, English-language proficiency may not be the primary source
of the difference, as our results were the same even with non-Americans removed from the
sample. Whatever the reason for the difference, future studies using both terminological and
facial-display items are certainly needed to more carefully tease apart the role of anger and
disgust as reactions to autonomy violations, since previous research indicates that this ishas
suggested that this may be a reliable method of dealing with problems (e.g., local
idiosyncrasies) of the English language.
One potential limitation of our methodology is that we did not include a condition
where the term “disgust” was presented without the adjective “moral”. Instead, we followed
the procedure used by Hutcherson and Gross, and provided participants with the synonym
“grossed out” as a stand-in for the term “disgust”. We argue that greater endorsement of
“moral disgust” compared to non-moral “grossed out”, as a response to community and
autonomy violations in our study and Hutcherson and Gross’s study may be attributed to the
addition of the word “moral” to the disgust term. Alternatively, it could be that some third
variable that distinguishes moral disgust from the other moral emotions moral anger, moral
contempt, and moral fear, better accounts for the enhanced endorsement of moral disgust.
PFor example, perhaps native English speakers understand the meaning of moral disgust,
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while finding the terms “moral anger”, “moral contempt”, and “moral fear” unclear. This
inscrutability may have , in turn, caused participants in our study to attend more avidly to the
word “moral” when applying these terms. To investigate this possibility, we asked conducted
a brief pilot study. Eightyeighty-two American English-speakers rated how certain they were
that they understood the meaning of the four moral-emotion terms on a 9-point scale (1 = Not
at all certain of its meaning; 5 = Moderately certain of its meaning; 9 = Very certain of its
meaning). We found that participants were certain of the meaning of moral anger (M = 5.94,
SD = 2.57), moral disgust (M = 6.51, SD = 2.34), and moral contempt (M = 6.17, SD = 2.35),
all above the midpoint of the scale, though less certain of the meaning of moral fear (M =
4.83, SD = 2.67), slightly below the midpoint. These results, along with the fact that the
moral terms were endorsed to a greater extent than their non-moral counterparts, make it
unlikely that differences in comprehension are behind the effect “moral” had on the emotion
terms in our study.
Implications for using the word “moral” to qualify disgust
In our moral version of the our study, the word “moral” had the predicted
“moralizing” effect on emotion ratings. TIn other words, the word “moral””Moral” seemed to
increase the relevance of various emotions as responses to moral transgressions, but only
when the emotion by itself was not recognized as a prevailing response to the scenario.
Across the three CAD domains, affixing “moral” to fear/anxiety significantly increased the
initially low intensity ratings of this emotion. Moreover, the word “moral” also increased the
intensity of the moral emotions of anger and contempt in domains where the CAD model and
our findings predicts these emotions should not be relevant. Therefore, it seems that adding
the word “moral” can increase the perceived relevance of any emotion term to a moral
situation, including ones not usually thought of as having moral relevance.
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The present findings hafindings have ve theoretical and empirical implications for
researchers who studying the other-condemning moral emotions. This research suggests that
it is important for rResearchers shouldto take care when measuring moral emotions because
participants may not agree with researchers on the meaning of emotion terms, such as moral
disgust or contempt. Moreover, our findings warn against adopting the term “moral disgust”
as a measure of disgust in moral contexts, as the adjective “moral” does not seem to increase
the intensity of theoretically relevant emotion responses, only. It does however increase the
intensity of non-relevant ones. This raises questions about whether the “moral” adjective is
really getting at a distinctt emotional state, or just awareness about the applicability of the
moral context to the item. In some ways asking about “moral disgust” and not moral anger or
contempt is similar to asking whether a fire engine is burgundy, vermilion or “fire-engine
red.”
Drawing overly fine distinctions in trying to measure different kinds of disgust not
only risks the methodological error of double-barrelled item construction, but also risks
ignoring disgust’s most interesting feature – that a similar response governs reactions to
disease cues, blood and gore, deformity, threats to human essence, violation of bodily-moral
norm violations, and possibly other moral violations transgressions (see Keltner & Haidt,
1999). Rather than search for moral subspecies of emotions of emotions, we think it more
fruitful to recognize that the same emotion can be feltappear in moral and non-moral
contexts. The unreliability of single terms in measuring disgust and contempt also highlights
the necessity of measuring moral emotions using multiple methods (e.g., emotion synonyms,
facial expression endorsement, facial reactions, and physiological responses). AFor example,
across multiple lines of research it has been found that reactions of anger and disgust can be
distinguished when both verbal reports and facial displays were measured (see Gutierrez &
Giner-Sorolla, 2007; Gutierrez, Vasiljevic, & Giner-Sorolla, in press; P. S. Russell & Giner-
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Sorolla, 2011a). Finally, this research reinforces a body of existing evidence that disgust
(considered separately from contempt and anger) applies primarily to moral contexts that
variously have been described as “divinity,” “purity,” or “bodily-moral” violations. This in
turn may help researchers further understand crucial differences within this emotion family.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Bernhard Leidner for his assistance with this research.
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References
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Table 1
Emotion Intensity Ratings forin the Context of Community, Autonomy, and Divinity Violations (Aggregated) as a Function of Condition.
Anger/Moral
Anger
Contempt/Moral
Contempt
Moral Disgust Sadness Fear/Moral Fear Grossed Out
Code M SD M SD M SD M SD M SD M SD
Replication A 4.42a (0.91) 3.94c (1.20) 4.22b (0.83) 3.47d (1.05) 2.90e (1.16) 2.63f (1.33)
Moral Version A 4.51a (0.90) 4.27b (1.06) 4.28b (0.93) 3.79c (1.00) 3.46d (1.13) 2.91e (1.33)
Replication C 3.29a (1.06) 3.07b (0.99) 3.22a (1.00) 3.08b (0.93) 2.24c (1.18) 2.21c (1.36)
Moral Version C 3.38a (1.08) 3.28a (1.04) 3.29a (1.09) 3.27a (1.00) 2.68b (1.26) 2.37c (1.39)
Replication D 3.47b (1.310 3.45b (1.24) 4.37a (1.06) 3.52bc (1.14) 2.76c (1.30) 4.54a (1.02)
Moral Version D 3.84b (1.32) 3.82b (1.33) 4.59a (1.14) 3.72bc (1.24) 3.28c (1.50) 4.71a (1.12)
Note. Emotions within a row that share a superscript do not differ significantly at p < .003. The highest emotion intensity rating for each row is
shown in boldface. Replication = pure replication of Hutcherson and Gross (2011, Study 1) with the adjective “moral” only for disgust (N =
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111). Moral Version = replication of Hutcherson and Gross (2011, Study 1) with the adjective “moral” for anger, contempt, disgust, and fear (N
= 134). A = autonomy violations (9 items); C = community violations (12 items); D = divinity violations (6 items).
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Table 2
Frequency of “Best Descriptive” Emotion for Community, Autonomy, and Divinity Violations (Aggregated) as a Function of Condition.
Anger/Moral
Anger
Contempt/Moral
Contempt
Moral Disgust Sadness Fear/Moral Fear Grossed Out
Code Count % Count % Count % Count % Count % Count %
Replication A 376 38.4 127 13.0 242 24.7 125 12.8 88 9.0 22 2.2
Moral Version A 420 35.1 206 17.2 218 18.2 189 15.8 123 10.3 40 3.3
Replication C 319 24.2 266 20.2 285 21.6 308 23.4 95 7.2 44 3.3
Moral Version C 337 21.2 326 20.5 281 17.7 423 26.6 175 11.0 48 3.0
Replication D 89 13.4 49 7.4 180 27.1 67 10.1 22 3.3 256 38.6
Moral Version D 71 8.9 66 8.3 251 31.5 89 11.2 32 4.0 288 36.1
Note. Highest percentage of “best descriptive” emotion for each row is shown in boldface. Replication = pure replication of Hutcherson and
Gross (2011, Study 1) with the adjective “moral” only for disgust (N = 111). Moral Version = replication of Hutcherson and Gross (2011, Study
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1) with the adjective “moral” for anger, contempt, disgust, and fear (N = 134). A = autonomy violations (9 items); C = community violations (12
items); D = divinity violations (6 items).
29