Disgust and Anger Relate to Different Aggressive Responses to Moral Violations
People’s reactions and interactions within social media with one another may actually help reveal more about the relation of agressive responses to moral violations with people’s expression of either disgust of anger. The study conducted through their four types of methods asks–can the underlying outrage, if there is any, provide some insight to people’s response to moral violations? More specifically, is it possible to capture meaningful differences in how people respond to moral violations by creating a distinction between the two emotions that strongly underlie outrage–anger and disgust? Moral-foundations theory suggests that moral violations that may elicit disgust may include ones that involve purity or sanctity or those that are related to community ethics. Anger on the other hand, is triggered, mostly by moral violations that include harm-care or fairness reciprocity, or those that are under the umbrella of divinity ethics and violations of autonomy ethics. Studies on people’s approaches on anger and disgust based on moral violations with similar social applications show that feelings of anger can motivate more violent or attack tendencies while moral disgust might take a more passive-aggressive aproach by applying social distancing or by implementing punishment by ostracizing people.This further suggests that anger and disgust have a direct correlation with punishment of moral violations.The authors conducted four different types of studies targeting different angles that affects the conclusion of the study and documents the progress on how they achieved their results with slight variations of the methods.
In the first study, the researchers aim to determine how much anger and disgust can be elicited on a person depending on the target of the moral violations. The key prediction was that those particpants that were targeted of the moral violation will experience more anger and those that were targeted other than themselves would elicit more of a disgust. 200 participants were randomly selected to answer a survey and the results of the study showed that 66.2% of the participants endorsed anger and 22.4% of them endorsed disgust as the ones that best describe their feelings when presented with scenarios of moral violations. The pattern that emerged was that anger was endorsed more when the target was shifted from self to other while the other emotions presented on the survery decreased. However, in the second study, thought with similar methods and goals, they addressed the limitations that are posed on the first study which is that it relied too much on a small set of moral-violation scenarios that may limit its ecological validity. So in the second study, they included scenarios that the participants have witnessed or been have a been a target of in their day-to-day lives. The result is that the most predominant emotional response to the scenarios were disgust, followed by anger and contempt which contrasted with the findings of the first study which ranked anger and disgust with the highest ratings. The third study addressed the gap that was missing with …
