So Gross and Yet so Far Away: Psychological Distance Moderates the Effect of Disgust on Moral Judgment
How does disgust relate to morality? One intriguing finding from moral psychology research is that experiencing disgust makes people offer more severe judgments of unrelated morally contentious issues. Recent research from the ECBE shows that disgust affects moral judgment in particular of distant, rather than near violations. In other words, disgust influences your moral judgment of a lying politician more strongly than of a cheating spouse. Why would you want to avoid things that are far away already? This makes sense from a disease avoidance explanation of the role of disgust: disgust – an emotion that evolved to avoid sources of contagious pathogens – may during the course of human evolution have taken on the role of avoiding moral transgressors. And avoiding sources of contamination makes most sense for things for which you have no immunity, that is, for distant, strange things.
