There is substantial evidence for the hypothesis that accidental disgust does not affect moral ratings, contrary to the common view

Jylkkä, Jussi, Johanna Härkönen, and Jukka Hyönä. 2019. “Accidental Disgust Does Not Cause Moral Condemnation of Neutral Actions.” PsyArXiv. October 3. doi:10.31234/osf.io/b26vz

Abstract: Emotivism in moral psychology holds that making moral judgements is at least partly an affective process. Three emotivist hypotheses can be distinguished: the elicitation hypothesis (that moral transgressions elicit emotions); the amplification hypothesis (that disgust amplifies moral judgments); and the moralization hypothesis (that affect moralizes the non-moral). Even though the moralization hypothesis is the strongest and most radical form of emotivism, it has not been systematically experimentally tested. Most previous studies have used as stimuli morally wrong actions, and thus they cannot answer whether disgust is sufficient to moralize an otherwise neutral action. In Experiment 1 (N = 87) we tested the effect of accidental disgust on morally neutral scenarios, and in Experiment 2 (N = 510) the differential effect of disgust on neutral and wrong scenarios. The results did not support either the moralization or the amplification hypothesis. Instead, Bayesian analyses provided substantial evidence for the null hypothesis that accidental disgust does not affect moral ratings. In line with a recent meta-analysis suggesting that disgust has no effect on moral ratings, our study indicates that this field of research is plagued by false positives due to small sample sizes.