Emotional responses and aggressive sentiments toward self-targeting and other-targeting moral violations: Disgust, Anger, Aggression, Physical Strength & Physical Attractiveness

Tybur, J. M., Molho, C., Camak, B., Dores Cruz, T., Singh, G. D., & Zwicker, M. (2020). Disgust, Anger, and Aggression: Further Tests of the Equivalence of Moral Emotions. Collabra: Psychology, 6(1), 34. http://doi.org/10.1525/collabra.349

Abstract: People often report disgust toward moral violations. Some perspectives posit that this disgust is indistinct from anger. Here, we replicate and extend recent work suggesting that disgust and anger toward moral violations are in fact distinct in terms of the situations in which they are activated and their correspondence with aggressive sentiments. We tested three hypotheses concerning emotional responses to moral violations: (1) disgust is associated with lower-cost, indirectly aggressive motives (e.g., gossip and social exclusion), whereas anger is associated with higher-cost, directly aggressive motives (e.g., physical violence); (2) disgust is higher toward violations affecting others than it is toward violations affecting the self, and anger is higher toward violations affecting the self than it is toward violations affecting others; and (3) abilities to inflict costs on or withhold benefits from others (measured via physical strength and physical attractiveness, respectively) relate to anger, but not to disgust. These hypotheses were tested in a within-subjects study in which 233 participants came to the lab twice and reported their emotional responses and aggressive sentiments toward self-targeting and other-targeting moral violations. Participants’ upper body strength and physical attractiveness were also measured with a dynamometer and photograph ratings, respectively. The first two hypotheses were supported – disgust (but not anger) was related to indirect aggression whereas anger (but not disgust) was related to direct aggression, and disgust was higher toward other-targeting violations whereas anger was higher toward self-targeting violations. However, physical strength and physical attractiveness were unrelated to anger or disgust or to endorsements of direct or indirect aggression.

Keywords: disgust , anger , morality , aggression , punishment

Discussion

Studies using three different approaches have now found that anger and disgust toward moral violations differentially vary as a function of who is victimized by the transgression: one asked participants to verbally report the degree to which they felt moral disgust and the degree to which they felt anger (Hutcherson & Gross, 2011); one asked participants to verbally report the degree to which they felt disgust (importantly, without the term “moral”) and the degree to which they felt anger (Study 2; Molho et al., 2017); and, with this study included, six have asked participants how well facial expressions of disgust and facial expressions of anger match their feelings (Studies 1–3, Lopez et al., 2019; Studies 1 and 4, Molho et al., 2017). Of course, a finding’s frequency in the literature is not necessarily diagnostic of its truth, since file drawers can be filled with null findings and methodological variety across studies can mask the unreliability of an effect (Pashler & Harris, 2012). Given that the current study followed a pre-registered protocol in replicating one of these earlier studies (albeit with a within-subjects rather than between-subjects design), results should increase our confidence in the distinct relationships between disgust and anger and different types of aggression, as well as distinct relationships between moral violation target and anger versus disgust.

The novel finding afforded by our within-subjects design suggests that individuals who tend to be disgusted by moral violations also tend to endorse indirect aggression, but that within-person variation in disgust does not relate to within-person variation in indirect aggression. In contrast, both within- and between-participant variance in anger related to direct aggression. Said differently: the type of people who respond to moral violations with more disgust also tend to endorse greater indirect aggression, but greater disgust within an individual does not relate to greater indirect aggression sentiments. Naturally, these findings should be interpreted tentatively, both given their exploratory nature and given that we only assessed emotional responses and aggression twice. Nevertheless, they might suggest that the relationship between disgust and aggression is less dose-dependent than is the relationship between anger and aggression. That is, a little bit of disgust might have a similar effect on indirect aggression as a lot of disgust, whereas a little bit of anger might have less of an effect on indirect aggression than a lot of anger.

The degree to which disgust is expressed or experienced in response to moral violations across cultures is debated (compare Curtis and Biran, 2001, and Haidt, Rozin, McCauley, and Imada, 1997, with Han et al., 2016). The current study is, to the best of our knowledge, the first to find distinct relationships between disgust and anger and distinct types of aggression outside of the U.S. Such findings suggest that these relationships are not limited to the U.S. or to (native) English-speaking populations. Of course, the Netherlands and the U.S. are both Western, educated, developed nations that speak Germanic languages. Replications across more varied nations can usefully inform the degree to which these distinctions between disgust and anger generalize across cultures.

Implications for the recalibration theory of anger

Multiple studies have lent support to the hypothesis that stronger and more attractive individuals are more prone to anger and have a greater history of success in conflicts. Based on this literature, we proposed that anger – but not disgust – toward moral violations would covary with strength and attractiveness. Our results were inconsistent with both this novel hypothesis and with previous findings. That said, while the 95% confidence interval for the correlation between men’s strength and anger proneness overlapped with zero, it also included r = .27, the correlation we estimated based on our literature review. Hence, the apparent difference between conclusions from this study and others does not offer strong evidence for a smaller (or null) relationship between strength and anger proneness in this population relative to other populations. Nevertheless, the relationship between physical strength and anger proneness might vary across cultural contexts (to the point of it being weaker or equal to zero in the population from which we sampled here), as suggested by Sell and colleagues (2009). In Dutch society, physical strength might afford less ability to inflict costs on others than in U.S. society (or in Aka society, where physical strength is also associated with a history of aggression, as reported in one study; Hess et al., 2010), perhaps due to greater social sanctioning of aggressive individuals and, relatedly, greater reliance on centralized authorities to solve disputes (Pinker, 2011). A recent study of men from Scotland and Germany – societies more similar to the Netherlands than the U.S. in terms of violence – similarly found little evidence for a relationship between strength and anger proneness (Von Borell et al., 2019). Ultimately, given the lack of replication of the finding that strength relates to anger proneness, we hesitate to abandon the hypothesis that strength differentially relates to anger and disgust. We recommend further tests of this idea, perhaps in other locations that have detected relationships between strength and anger proneness (e.g., the United States).

Limitations and future directions

Naturally, multiple limitations apply to the current findings. We discuss three notable ones. First, data were collected from a relatively affluent sample of young Dutch participants. As noted above, some of the relationships observed in the current study might not be generalizable to other populations. Second, the single-item measures of emotion based on posed facial expressions are noisy. Imprecision in this measure might attenuate effect size, and results using this type of measure might not generalize to other measures of emotion (e.g., measurements of facial expression; verbal self-reports). Third, participants reported hypothetical responses to hypothetical moral violations. The extent to which these responses – in terms of emotion or aggression – would generalize to behaviors in more ecologically valid conditions is an open question. Behavioral studies report that, in contrast to the strong sentiments to directly aggress against moral transgressors in third-party settings described here, people rarely directly aggress to help others (Pedersen et al., 2019). Further, some evidence suggests that responses to hypothetical moral transgressions and responses to actual moral transgressions are predicted by different factors (e.g., Baumert et al., 2013). Hence, null results (e.g., between formidability and aggression) should be interpreted tentatively, and relations between emotion and aggression should be investigated in non-hypothetical contexts.