Why is disgust a more unreasoned emotion than anger? An examination of the cognitive processes that accompany moral anger and disgust

The purpose of this thesis was to compare the cognitive processes that accompany moral anger and disgust. Experiment 1 indicated that anger responds to the contextual cues of harm and intent, while disgust responds uniquely to the categorical judgement of whether or not a bodily norm violation has occurred. Experiments 2 and 3 supported the assumption that disgust more so than anger is an unreasoned emotion, bodily moral disgust was justified with non-elaborated reasons, while non-bodily moral disgust and anger were justified with more cognitively elaborated reasons. The next line of research tested possible explanations for why these differences may occur. Experiment 4 was carried out in order to determine whether inherent features of anger and disgust would influence participants’ willingness to describe their social attitudes. It was found that an environmental manipulation of disgust decreased participants’ willingness to describe their thoughts and feelings about a social group, particularly when the group can be perceived as violating a bodily norm. However, the results failed to support the predictions for the anger manipulation. Experiments 5 and 6 examined whether the asymmetry in reasoning occurs due to social norms that are associated with moral anger and disgust. The results suggested that people are aware of social norms concerning how anger and disgust should be explained; however, personal feelings of moral anger and disgust modify the applicability of these social norms in some instances. The theoretical and practical implications for the results of this thesis are also discussed.