Moral Anger and Disgust: Examining the Recipient vs. Initiator Focus in the Moral Evaluation of Transgressions

This study aimed to test whether inducing participants' attention towards the agent or recipient of a moral violation would elicit different emotional responses. Fictional situations were created to spotlight either the recipient's experience (e.g., a person being tripped on the street) or the initiator experience (e.g., a person tripping another). Participants were presented with a series of vignettes describing moral transgressions and asked to judge as quickly as possible whether the emotional reactions of third parties depicted in different facial expressions were consistent with what would be expected regarding the misconduct. In two studies (N = 315) we tested the hypotheses that focusing on the initiator would stress their poor moral character and elicit distancing reactions typical of moral disgust, while focusing on the recipient would emphasize the harmful act and the recipient's resulting personal distress, aligning more closely with moral anger. The results indicate that directing participants' attention to the recipient resulted in a quicker and more frequent selection of angry expressions compared to disgust. However, a preference for disgust was primarily evident in scenarios depicting moral transgressions in the initiator-focus condition but not in the recipient-focus condition, only when compared to neutral affect.