IMPLICATIONS OF THESE FINDINGS FOR RESEARCH ON THE EFFECT

The first aim of the present research was to examine whether disgust (as a discrete emotion) exerts a domain-specific influence on moral judgments. The results of this investigation showed that the influence of disgust on moral judgments is moral-specific, in the sense that it is exclusively limited to moral dilemmas. No effect of disgusting priming on non-moral judgments occurred either in super-quick or quick conditions. However, results from Study 4 with fear stimuli revealed that the documented effect on moral judgments cannot be attributed (at least not exclusively) to the discrete emotion of disgust. Indeed, as mentioned in the previous discussion, it appears that the

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documented effect is caused by more basic affective computations that are involved in the complete experience of disgust and fear. In particular, results from Study 2 and Study 4 strongly suggest that the influence of our affective inductions in moral judgments should be attributed to (at least) the dimensions of negative valence and/or high activation.

An intriguing question that arises from this work concerns the specificity of the obtained effect on moral judgments. Considering this problematic, results from Study 3 suggest a possible explanation of the fact that affective priming only had an effect on participants´ moral judgments. Thus, our findings indicate that the specificity of this effect on moral judgments relies on core affective dimensional properties that are in some way inherent to moral dilemmas. Particularly, moral dilemmas seem to be intrinsically affective, in the sense that their mere perception elicits activating negative feelings.64 This finding constitutes a crucial distinction between moral dilemmas and dilemmas that do not imply moral considerations.

Conversely, the perception of non-moral dilemmas did not elicit any significant affective reaction in participants. Such a finding was supported by the analysis of the differences in RT between the two types of dilemmas. Thus, participants took longer to rate their feelings—in valence and arousal—after reading moral dilemmas than after reading non-moral dilemmas. This finding is in line with the assumption that there is a general increase in RT for responses to affective stimulus (McKenna & Sharma, 1995).

The results of this research have direct implications for the study of the causal relationship between incidental emotions and moral judgments. For instance, the present investigation provides new insights into the growing research on disgust and moral judgments. Therefore, we suggest that the influence of disgust on moral judgments needs to be redefined in terms of an interaction; in particular, effects of disgusting inductions in moral judgments need to be understood in the context of an interaction

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It must be acknowledged that if we argue that the affective nature of moral judgments is mediating the specificity of the affective priming effect, then any affective judgments might be influenced in the same particular way. Our data cannot support this prediction, but we will return to this issue when discussing future directions of this research.

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between the particular dimensional-cognitive properties of this emotion and the affective dimensional properties of moral dilemmas.

As reviewed in Section (1.2.2), there is strong evidence supporting that emotions are a significant driving force of moral judgment. A variety of evidence suggests that moral judgment is more a matter of emotion and affective intuition than of deliberate reasoning (Greene & Haidt, 2002). According to the Social Intuitionist Model of moral judgment (Haidt, 2001), the perception of a social event automatically elicits an instant feeling of approval or disapproval. These feelings can be understood as affect-laden intuitions, as they appear automatically in consciousness with an affective valence (good/bad) but without any feeling of having gone through a fine-grained inference process.

For instance, neuroscientific studies show that emotional structures are recruited when making moral judgments (Blair, 1995; Greene & Haidt, 2002). Moreover, as mentioned in Section (1.2.2.2.2), studies on “moral dumbfounding”—a cognitive state where a person knows that something is morally wrong, but cannot find reasons to justify this belief—suggest that sometimes, moral preferences need no inferences65. Further, knowing that something is morally wrong and explaining why appear to be completely separate psychological processes. Consequently, affective-laden intuitions play a crucial role in the knowing, while reasoning (argumentative function) is crucial in the explaining.

In this context, the fact that affective priming inductions only influenced moral judgments can be interpreted as new evidence supporting this theoretical position. On the basis of the above-mentioned literature, results from this investigation suggest that feelings of activating negative affects influence moral judgments because the processing of this type of judgments recruits participants’ affective responses. A further clue came from the results of Study 3. Interestingly, unlike non-moral dilemmas, moral dilemmas share the same dimensional properties (negative affect and high activation) with the affective primes used in this research. It is to some extent intriguing that, although

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We apologize to Robert Zajonc for having modified the title of his classic article, “Feeling and thinking: Preferences need no inferences” (1980).

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moral judgments are known to involve affective processes (Section 1.2.2), previous research on the influence of incidental disgust in moral judgments have omitted the methodological implications of this fact.

Thus, literature on affective priming suggests that a variant of the Stroop mechanism (MacLeod, 1991) might be underlying the moral-specificity of the documented effect. This mechanism accepts evaluative information just like any other available information. Then, in order to be operative, the Stroop mechanism only requires some amount of overlap between task-relevant features of targets, on the one hand, and features of irrelevant distracters-primes, on the other hand (Klauer & Mush, 2003).

Indeed, results from Study 3 show that this requirement seems to be fulfilled in our experimental paradigms. Thus, the mentioned match in the dimensional properties of target (moral dilemmas) and affective primes suggests that such a mechanism might explain the mechanics underlying the specificity of the documented effect of affective priming on moral judgments. This issue can be appropriately addressed in future investigations of this nature, so we will come back to its consideration in the discussion of the Limitations and Future Directions of this investigation (3.4).

3.3. IMPLICATIONS OF THESE FINDINGS FOR RESEARCH ON THE