Judgment of Bad Character Distinguishes Moral Disgust from Anger

Moral violations often evoke disgust. While it has been consistently shown that disgust is a predominant emotion in response to bodily purity violations, its role in sociomoral violations, in which pathogen content or misuse of the body is not involved, is still debated. Inspired by Giner-Sorolla & Chapman (2017) who suggested that disgust is more closely associated with judgment of bad moral character than anger, whereas anger is more closely associated with judgment of harmful acts and consequences than disgust, the current research further examined this hypothesis from three different angles. Drawing on the research literature on dark personalities, Experiments 1 to 3 (Ns = 191, 180, 157) used non-harmful behavioural signals of sadism, narcissism, and Machiavellianism, respectively, to manipulate agents' bad moral character in vignettes, and found that disgust (vs. anger) responded more sensitively to bad moral character, whereas anger (vs. disgust) responded more sensitively to harm. Experiments 4 and 5 (Ns = 146, 186) tested whether framing moral offences to highlight either the agents' bad character or harm they caused increases disgust or anger. Results showed that the framing had limited influences on people's emotional responses. Experiment 6 (N = 224) showed that expressions of disgust (vs. anger) more strongly signal to third-party observers that the target of the emotion has bad moral character. The results shed light on the difference between the two often intertwined moral emotions and the distinct function of disgust in marking individuals with bad moral character independently of harmful consequences of their actions.