Disgust at Tainted Souls: Testing the Character Hypothesis of Disgust through Descriptions of Dark Personality Traits

Disgust is commonly reported in response to socio-moral violations, but whether and how it differs from anger in these contexts is often debated. Preliminary evidence that disgust tracks the bad character of actors has left unanswered the question of which observable actions, other than visibly harming other people, lead to such character judgments. We tested the character hypothesis of disgust using a novel idea: that the perception of dark personality traits could be an important cue to bad character without direct harm. Our three pre-registered experiments (Ns = 191, 180, 157) tested participants’ emotional responses to observable behavioral signals of sadism, narcissism, and Machiavellianism respectively. Harmful consequences were also manipulated in two of the experiments. Results further supported the character hypothesis of disgust, shedding light on the difference between the two often intertwined moral emotions and the multi-faceted concept of bad moral character.