DISGUST, ANGER, AND MORAL OUTRAGE 1 The Interactive Effect of Anger and Disgust in Moral Outrage and Judgments

Two studies demonstrated that moral outrage is predicted not just from anger, but from a combination of anger and disgust. In Study 1, anger toward moral transgressions (sexual assault, funeral picketing) predicted moral outrage only when it co-occurred with at least moderate disgust, and vice versa. In Study 2, a mock jury paradigm that included emotionally disturbing photographs of a murder victim revealed disgust (versus anger) to be a more consistent predictor—predicting moral outrage at all levels of anger. Further, anger increased confidence in a guilty verdict through moral outrage—but only when co-occurring with at least a moderate level of disgust, whereas disgust increased confidence in a guilty verdict through moral outrage at all levels of anger. The interactive effect of anger and disgust has important implications for theoretical explanations of moral outrage, moral judgments in general, and legal decision making. DISGUST, ANGER, AND MORAL OUTRAGE 3 The Interactive Effect of Anger and Disgust in Moral Outrage and Judgments People react to moral transgressions with moral outrage—a constellation of cognitive, affective, and behavioral reactions (Skitka, Bauman, & Mullen, 2004; Tetlock , Kristel, Elson, Green, & Lerner, 2000), which influences a variety of important outcomes: retribution and compensation (Carlsmith, Darley, & Robinson, 2002; Tetlock et al., 2000), political intolerance (Skitka et al., 2004), voting (Okimoto & Brescoll, 2010), and legal decisions (Salerno et al., 2010). For example, the Westboro Church roused moral outrage in the public by picketing military funerals, bearing signs reading “Thank God for dead soldiers” to communicate their belief that military deaths reflect God’s punishment for tolerating homosexuality. Despite our intuitive understanding of what moral outrage is, researchers debate its emotional components. Can the public’s reaction be characterized as mere anger, or perhaps a more complex combination of anger and disgust? The current studies investigate whether moral outrage arises from the combination of anger and disgust. The term “outrage” conjures emotional reactions grounded in anger and, indeed, moral outrage is often operationalized—sometimes exclusively—with anger measures (e.g., Batson et al., 2007; O’Mara et al., 2011; Tetlock et al., 2000). Moreover, some researchers question the existence of “moral outrage” altogether, concluding that it indistinguishable from personal or empathetic anger (Batson et al., 2007; O’Mara et al., 2011). A few studies, however, have included disgust measures in their operationalization of moral outrage (e.g., Okimoto & Brescoll, 2010). Some researchers include disgust in the definition of moral outrage (e.g., Jensen & Petersen, 2011) or suggest that disgust could contribute to moral outrage (e.g., Darley & Pittman, 2003; Mullen & Skitka, 2006). Further, moral transgressions elicit appraisals associated not only DISGUST, ANGER, AND MORAL OUTRAGE 4 with anger, but also disgust (Rozin, Lowery, Imada, & Haidt, 1999). Disgust is theorized to be a moral emotion (Rozin et al., 1999), often considered a gut feeling (Schnall, Haidt, Clore, & Jordan, 2008) elicited by purity violations of body or soul (Horberg, Oveis, Keltner, & Cohen, 2009). Disgust cues (e.g., offensive odors) result in harsher moral judgments (Schnall et al., 2008), and neural regions associated with disgust are likewise associated with moral judgments (Moll et al., 2005). In fact, disgust is sometimes a more consistent emotional reaction to moral violations than is anger (Hutcherson & Gross, 2011). Determining whether moral outrage arises from a combination of anger and disgust requires testing both their independent and interactive effects. Assessing the independent roles of anger and disgust in moral judgments is difficult given that they are likely to co-vary (Marzillier & Davey, 2004) and people sometimes use the term “disgust” interchangeably with “anger” (Nabi, 2002; Olatunji et al., 2012). Researchers have thus highlighted the need to differentiate between their antecedent appraisals and consequences (Hutcherson & Gross, 2011), measure them simultaneously (Gutierrez & Giner-Sorolla, 2007), and examine their independent effects on moral judgments by controlling for each statistically (e.g., Horberg et al., 2009). These investigations revealed that anger and disgust can operate differently. For example, violations of bodily norms and taboos elicit disgust, whereas harm elicits anger (Gutierrez & Giner-Sorolla, 2007), and disgust is more resistant to change in the face of new, mitigating information (Russell & Giner-Sorolla, 2011). Despite the frequent co-occurrence of anger and disgust, and the efforts to investigate their independent effects on moral judgments, we are unaware of any studies testing the unique effect of disgust on moral outrage, nor the disgust-anger interactive effect on moral outrage (or on moral judgments in general). Why, theoretically, might anger and disgust interact to produce DISGUST, ANGER, AND MORAL OUTRAGE 5 moral outrage? Both anger and disgust are associated with certainty appraisals (Smith & Ellsworth, 1985), and as a result, both anger (Bodenhausen, Sheppard, & Kramer, 1994) and disgust (Tiedens & Linton, 2001) can diminish information processing. Thus, anger and disgust might each exacerbate the effect of the other. For example, increasing anger might lead to increased reliance on visceral gut reactions (disgust) in our judgments and vice versa. Thus, perhaps moral outrage represents a unique combination of anger and disgust in which the two emotions interact to exacerbate each other’s influence on judgments. The primary goal of these studies was to investigate whether moral outrage arises from a combination of disgust and anger by testing the interactive effect of anger and disgust on moral outrage and subsequent judgments. We hypothesized that anger and disgust would predict moral outrage only when each co-occurs with at least a moderate level of the other. Because moral outrage has been identified as an important mediator of anger on downstream social consequences (Skitka et al., 2004), we tested whether moral outrage would mediate the effect of anger and disgust on verdicts in a murder case, and whether each indirect effect would be moderated by the other emotion (Study 2). Specifically, we hypothesized that (a) moral outrage would mediate the effect of anger on murder verdicts, but only when co-occurring with at least moderate disgust, and (b) moral outrage would mediate the effect of disgust on murder verdicts, but only when co-occurring with at least moderate anger.