With a Clean Conscience

@article{Schnall2008WithAC,
  title={With a Clean Conscience},
  author={Simone Schnall and Jennifer Benton and Sophie Harvey},
  journal={Psychological Science},
  year={2008},
  volume={19},
  pages={1219 - 1222}
}
Theories of moral judgment have long emphasized reasoning and conscious thought while downplaying the role of intuitive and contextual influences. However, recent research has demonstrated that incidental feelings of disgust can influence moral judgments and make them more severe. This study involved two experiments demonstrating that the reverse effect can occur when the notion of physical purity is made salient, thus making moral judgments less severe. After having the cognitive concept of… 
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383 Citations
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Background Citations
90
Methods Citations
9
Results Citations
19

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Abstract The past few decades of moral psychology research have yielded empirical anomalies for rationalist theories of moral judgments. An increasing number of psychologists and philosophers argue…
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TLDR
The possibility that only non-conscious activation of the cleanliness concept, as achieved in participants with low response effort on priming materials, can produce the expected effect is examined.
Does Disgust Influence Moral Judgment?
Recent empirical research seems to show that emotions play a substantial role in moral judgment. Perhaps the most important line of support for this claim focuses on disgust. A number of philosophers…
Does Incidental Disgust Amplify Moral Judgment? A Meta-Analytic Review of Experimental Evidence
  • J. Landy, Geoffrey P. Goodwin
  • Psychology
    Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science
  • 2015
TLDR
A meta-analysis of all available studies in which incidental disgust was manipulated prior to or concurrent with a moral judgment task found evidence for a small amplification effect of disgust, which is strongest for gustatory/olfactory modes of disgust induction.
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