Why Does Disgust Induction Cause Conservatives to Become More Prejudice but Liberals Less Prejudice?

For the purposes of this post, I am going to refer to high authoritarians as conservatives and low authoritarians as liberals. I have two reasons for doing this: 1. Political conservatism is strongly correlated with right-wing authoritarianism and 2. Liberal and conservative are terms that are more manageable and easily understood.
There are many possible reasons why conservatives and liberals react differently to disgust induction. Haidt’s research suggests that liberals and conservatives differ in regard to their moral emotions. In other words, conservatives and liberals base their moral judgments on different emotions. For example, liberals are more sensitive to empathy whereas conservatives are more sensitive to disgust.
One possible reason why conservatives become more prejudice when disgusted may be because they are more sensitive to disgust. But this does not help explain why liberals become less prejudice when they are disgusted.
It is possible that liberals are averse to prejudice. The aversive racism literature suggests that people avoid expressing prejudicial attitudes so they are not seen as bigots. Thus, liberals are disgusted at the prospect of being prejudice whereas conservatives are disgusted by homosexuality.
Disgust is an emotion that originally evolved to avoid oral ingestion of contaminants as Darwin suggested in The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals. More recently, Haidt and colleagues have indicated that morally repugnant acts can induce disgust. My hunch is that evolution designed the emotion of disgust as a general mechanism for the avoidance of undesirable stimuli but our culture is what tweaks the knobs.
More research needs to be done to confirm this hypothesis.

More Evidence for the Role of Moral Emotions in the Formation of Moral Judgments

I recently posted some of the findings from my thesis, which suggests that moral emotions are more predictive of moral judgments than moral reasoning. Specifically, people who are high in disgust sensitivity and high in moral development are just as prejudice toward homosexuals as those who are low in moral reasoning, which indicates that disgust can overwhelm our ability to reason.

In the second study of my thesis, I found that inducing disgust can make certain individuals more prejudice toward homosexuals while making other individuals report less prejudice.

Participants in this study were asked to read one of two scenarios and write a brief paragraph describing their physical and emotional reactions. Half of the participants imagined what it would be like to consume a bowl of maggots and the other half described what it would be like to eat a bowl of lettuce.

Following the experimental manipulation, the participants completed measures of prejudice toward homosexuals, disgust sensitivity, and authoritarianism. Authoritarianism was measured using the right-wing authoritarianism scale, which assess conventionalism, authoritarian submission, and aggression toward out-groups. Traditionally, individuals who score high on the right-wing authoritarianism scale are more likely to be prejudice toward homosexuals, minorities, and more likely to be politically conservative.

Disgust induction for individuals who scored high on the authoritarianism scale resulted in an increase in prejudicial attitudes toward homosexuals as compared to those in the control group. In addition, disgust induction for those who scored low on the authoritarianism scale led to a decrease in prejudicial attitudes toward homosexuals as compared to those in the control group.

These results demonstrate that conservatives and liberals are differentially affected by the moral emotion of disgust.

Moral Emotions vs. Moral Reasoning

Psychologist are currently debating the underlying processes involved in our moral judgments. Some psychologists believe that our moral judgments are caused by automatic unconscious moral intuitions whereas others believe they are due to conscious reasoning and reflection.

Traditionally, psychologists subscribed to the rationalist perspective. Rationalist proponents have included Jean Piaget, Lawrence Kohlberg, and James Rest. According to their perspective, moral reasoning follows a cognitive-developmental trajectory in which individuals progress from basing their moral judgments on selfish issues early in development to basing them on universal ethical principles later in development.

More recent evidence, however, suggests that moral judgments may result from quick, automatic flashes of emotion. The intuitionist perspective assumes that moral reasoning serves as a post hoc rationalization rather than a cause of moral judgments.

In support of the intuitionis perspective, Jonathan Haidt found that when participants were asked to imagine a scenario in which a brother and sister have a sexual encounter, participants invariably label the behavior as morally wrong. However, they have a difficult time explaining why they find immoral. Participants often cite the danger of inbreeding and the emotional damage that could be caused by the sexual encounter. When the researcher reminds them that the brother and sister used two forms of protection and neither of them was emotionally affected by the encounter, the participants respond by saying something like “I don’t know, I can’t explain it. I just know it is wrong.”

So if it is not moral reasoning that causes our moral judgements, what is it? Haidt suggest that it is our moral emotions. These emotions include empathy, guilt, embarassment, anger, disgust, etc.

In a recent attempt to determine whether moral reasoning or moral emotions played a bigger role in predicting moral judgments, my advisor and I examined the roles of moral reasoning and the moral emotion of disgust in predicting individuals' attitudes toward homosexuality.

We found that individuals who were high in moral reasoning were less likely to hold prejudicial attitudes toward homosexuals and that individuals who were sensitive to disgust were more likely to exhibit prejudicial attitudes toward homosexuals.

More importantly, our results showed that the moral emotion of disgust overwhelms moral reasoning such that individuals who are high in both moral reasoning and disgust ressemble those who are low in moral reasoning in regard to their prejudicial attitudes toward homosexuals.

Additionally, people who were high in disgust were more likely to be anti-abortion, more likely to want a stricter immigration policy, more likely to support the war in Iraq, and less likely to support terminal patients' right to die.

In his book, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Darwin (1872) refers to disgust as “something revolting, primarily in relation to the sense of taste, as actually perceived or vividly imagined." Although, the emotion of disgust evolved for the purpose of avoiding oral contamination. The evidence presented here suggests that it also serves a secondary as one of our moral emotions.

Click here and learn more about the moral emotions.

The Evolution of a Moral Faculty

Some religious opponents argue that we need religion because it provides us with a moral compass. According to them, without religion we would be wicked, hedonistic creatures that only looked out for their own benefit. But what if we didn’t need religion to be moral? What if evolution endowed us with the components that we need to make moral decisions?

In Marc Hauser’s newest book, Moral Minds, he suggests that evolution has given us the tools that we need to make decisions about right and wrong. He compares this faculty to the evolution of language and describes it as a universal moral grammar. Much of Hauser’s book focuses on our ability to perceive intention and the intentional system’s role in producing decisions about right and wrong.

The crux of Hauser’s argument is based on research that uses a moral dilemma about a trolley that is out of control. Participants are given one of two scenarios:

In the first scenario participants are told that a trolley is out of control and 5 people are standing on the track unable to escape. The only way to avoid the death of the five people is to pull a lever that will cause the train to switch tracks, but there is another person on that track. They are then asked whether or not someone should pull the lever sacrificing 1 person to save the other 5.

In the second scenario participants are confronted with the same out of control trolley, but this time they are told that the lever will drop a large person in front of the trolley, which will cause the trolley to stop, thus saving the five individuals.

What Hauser and his colleagues found was that individuals confronted with the first scenario will, more often than not, say that it is ok to pull the lever. However, those who are given the second scenario will, more often than not, say that it is wrong to pull the lever. Hauser believes that the reason there is a difference between the responses to these two scenarios is because the victim in scenario one would be a foreseeable casualty, but the victim in the second scenario would be an intended consequence.

This, of course, is a simplified version of Hauser’s argument. Check out his book, Moral Minds, for his complete argument for an evolved moral capacity.

Learn About Your Brain and Change Your Life

I recently read Mind Wide Open by Steven Johnson. The book catalogs the author's journey to understand the human brain. Johnson learns everything from how we read the minds of others to the neurochemical applications involved in our perceptions of love. He participates in neurofeedback tests and fMRI scans. In his sojourn through the intricacies of his own mind, he gains a better understanding of mechanisms that underlie his own behavior. In a recent article posted on Slate.com, several prominent scientists describe how learning about the human mind has changed their lives. The more we learn about the human brain, the more incite we gain into our own thoughts and actions. Take a look at how brain science has changed the lives of Steven Pinker, Marc Hauser, Oliver Sacks, and others.
http://www.slate.com/id/2165043/