Motivation and emotion/Book/2026/Moral disgust and jury decision-making

Moral disgust and jury decision-making: How does moral disgust impact jurors' judgements of guilt, blame, and punishment?

Overview

Figure 1. A jury is a group of sworn individuals who determine a defendant's guilt. Consider sitting on a jury. The defendant appears composed, well-dressed, and speaks clearly. Someone like this couldn't have done anything bad — that's your instinct. Then you hear the charge: embezzlement. Over three years, they quietly transferred company funds to a personal account. Thousands of dollars were spent, and real people were harmed. You are angry. It's wrong. However, it does not make you feel sick. Consider the same composed defendant in the same courtroom, but this time the charge is posing as a charity volunteer to gain the trust of dying hospice patients before stealing the donations intended for their care. The financial loss is the same as the embezzlement case. Same amount, same number of victims. But something else arises in you. Not just anger, but more of a revulsion, as if something was contaminated. This doesn't simply feel like a crime. It has an unclean feeling to it. The same defendant. Same harm. So, why does one case make you feel cold and angry, while the other makes your skin crawl? And, aside from the actual harm done, could that visceral reaction be influencing how harshly you believe they should be punished?

It is the law that jurors must base their verdicts on the facts of a case. But moral disgust, an emotional gut reaction, seems to influence how jurors assess guilt, blame and punishment, regardless of the strength of the evidence presented. A disgusted juror might unconsciously become more certain of guilt, assign more blame and suggest harsher punishment, regardless of what the facts actually establish. If disgust always biases judgements and sentences in one direction or the other, no matter how strong a case is, the implications are profound: wrongful convictions, disproportionate sentencing, and differences in the punishment of similar crimes depending on how “disgusting” the evidence seems, rather than the true seriousness of the crime. It also raises questions for current legal practices: courts commonly admit gruesome evidence under the assumption that its evidentiary value outweighs its emotional impact, an assumption this body of research directly undermines. Psychological science provides the legal system with something it cannot produce itself: controlled empirical evidence about the nature and causes of this bias. It shows not only that jurors appear to be affected by emotion but also the processes (appraisal patterns, purity vs. harm, violations, and individual differences such as private body consciousness) that determine when and for whom the effect is strongest.

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Focus questions If disgust can make moral judgements more severe, even when it’s incidental to the act being judged, what does that say about the reliability of human moral reasoning? Can moral disgust be used by the legal system? How might a juror's own sensitivity to physiological sensations of disgust impact how vulnerable they are to disgust-driven bias? How can psychological theories be used to mitigate risks of bias in the legal system?

What is Moral Disgust?

Disgust

Disgust is one of the six universal emotions that humans experience and can be visually recognised on a person's face. The emotion of disgust is theorised to have originated from a biological protective mechanism to protect an organism from harm that may be brought on by food or poison. Disgust has evolved to become an emotion/behaviour directed at anything that may potentially cause harm or disease. For example,

• body products
• animals
• hygiene
• body violations, death or disease

Paul Ekman proposed six basic emotions in his literature based on the theories that these emotions, across research all over the world, concluded in agreement on six emotions: happiness, surprise, fear, anger, sadness and disgust. Therefore, he proposed that the universality of these findings and the facial expression alone could conclude that there are 6 basic emotions (Ekman, 1992).

Moral Disgust

Moral disgust refers to the emotional response a person feels when their social or cultural norms are transgressed, therefore resulting in a reaction. Moral disgust is complex, and there is varying evidence for and against its genuine purpose as an emotion. Researchers argue that moral disgust is a metaphorical extension of physical disgust; shared facial expression, language, etc. Other researchers argue that it's functionally unique to traditional, physical disgust. It does not reliably trigger the same physiological processes: facial muscle activation, nausea, etc. (Chapman et al., 2012).

Moral disgust is triggered by acts that are supposedly a violation of an individual's perceived purity or dignity. For example, betraying someone's trust (cheating on a partner) or exploiting a vulnerable person (as mentioned in the scenario at the start).

Rozin et al. (1999) proposed a theory that moral disgust specifically clusters around violations of a person's divinity or purity. This is different from anger, which generally clusters around autonomy violations, also opposed to contempt, which clusters around community violations.

This distinction is vital when discussing emotion for jurors. If moral disgust behaves differently from physical disgust, it may influence judgement in the courtroom through a different pathway than a simple reaction to physically disgusting evidence.

Russell & Giner-Sorolla (2013) discuss four competing arguments of disgust's role in moral condemnation. Firstly, the most flexible view of moral disgust that can be applied widely for many crimes is the general morality position. It claims that disgust is an all-purpose emotion which is seen through different kinds of moral disapproval, not just a narrow category. Secondly, disgust as a violation of bodily and spiritual purity is more specific. As mentioned prior, this claim is supported by Rozin's CAD (contempt, anger, disgust) triad. The third argument proposes that moral disgust is only a metaphor. The true emotion being experienced is anger, and individuals just use language as a metaphor (e.g., "that's disgusting") for how condemning they feel. Finally, Russell & Ginger-Sorolla's own claim for moral disgust is a middle ground for all the arguments in their research. Regardless of whether harm or justice is involved, they contend that disgust specifically tracks violations pertaining to the body and its products. Anger tends to co-occur with violations that are specifically related to justice, harm, or rights. This disgust behaves more like anger wearing the vocabulary of disgust than it does like bodily moral disgust.

Moral disgust and physical disgust are the same emotion:

	True
	False

Psychological Science in the Legal System

• What psychological theories are present in the legal system

Social Identity Theory

Classic social identity theory posits that groups and whole organisations that possess the same cultural and social norms will have perceive themselves as sharing something in common. This adds to their own personal self-concept as an individual and as a member of a society/societies. Bronewasser & Bober (1987) argue that this theory describes a class or collective of people (people who may share traits but have no real interdependence) but not a genuine societal group. Groups depend on structure; roles, positions and relationships that require dependence from people.

Through this theory, a jury is considered to be a genuine structured group. There are roles, a task and an interdependence through deliberation. This theory may offer a further point on why moral disgust may bias jurors. Moral disgust can function as a social categorisation cue, marking defendants as the out-group rather than in the jury's moral in-group. Bronewasser & Bober claim that even arbitary group labels are enough to produce an in-group favouritism and out-group favouritism. If a defendants act triggers moral disgust, this may mark them as being in the moral "outgroup" in a jurors mind. Independent of the actual evidence being presented, this compounds moral disgust biases.

• social identity theory
  • a theory that posits that whole organisations and groups that possess the same cultural and social norms will all have similar self-concepts (Bornewasser & Bober, 1987).
  • The theory predicts that behaviours from this group will often be similar due to their similar self-concept.
• appraisal theory of emotion
  • appraisal theory of emotion is theory that specific emotions are extracted from evaluations of events which in turn impact a reaction which may differ depending on certain people.
• evolutionary theory of emotion
  • this theory describes our emotions and reactions being biological reactions to stimuli.
    • for example, disgust has come from protecting oneself from poisons.

Disgust as a Legally Relevant Emotion

• Disgust should not be seen as legally relevant, as that would be a personal bias.
• How can you create a courtroom that is free from bias if you do not take into account the impact of disgust?
• Maybe disgust shouldn't be seen as an impacting emotion but rather a factor that needs to be considered when a jury is shown pictures, footage, and witness statements in court.

Arguments For

• Patrick Devlin's belief that we should allow some degree of the shared morality view of society through emotions
  • Within society, when crimes are viewed as "disgusting" or cause widespread intolerance, there is an importance to the intervention of the legal system (Lacey, 2023).
• Informing the "Reasonable Person" Standard
  • This is a theory that jurors will judge acts (particularly those involving negligence or abuse) based on what they believe they would have done in that situation. Or more accurately to the theory, what would a reasonably prudent person (RPP) have done (Alicke & Weigel, 2021)?

Arguments Against

• harm principle limitation
  • Developed by John Stuart Mills, the harm principle limitation states the following:
  • "The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others." (Mill, 1869).
  • This principle bars people within the legal system from criminalising an action because it makes most people feel moral disgust.
• a tool for discrimination
  • Historically, moral disgust has been a tool against those being charged with crimes of homosexuality and interracial marriages.

Moral Disgust and Juror Judgements

A jury is a group of 12 individuals that are carefully chosen to determine the guilt of an offender . They are picked to be impartial, unbiased opinions that can aid in the determining of a person's guilt. Jurors are asked to make judgements based on the evidence presented to them in court. However, emotions play a large, unsuspecting role in determining the guilt of a person. Such is the reason why, in high-stakes cases, jurors are not allowed contact with the outside world or media during trials. Moral disgust in particular seems to have a large impact on the way that jurors perceive and shape jurors' judgements. Different emotions elicit different reactions based on the emotion and a person's appraisal patterns.

Emotional Response Patterns

Fishbein & Ajzen's (1975) expectancy-value model states that a person's given attitude towards an object is a direct function of the value that a person attaches to that object's attributes or outcomes. In explicit terms, a person's value on an object will be a direct function of the value that they place on said item and the positive or negative emotions they associate with it. Furthermore, the positive or negative characteristics that they associate with the object will be a weighted decision on the direct outcome that may occur due to the object.

In a review of the role of emotion-induced expectancies, Desteno et al. (2004) argue that positive and negative emotions have been grouped together and oversimplified, which makes distinguishing them difficult. The studies found that specificity operates through an emotion-matching process. Whilst the study did not touch on disgust specifically, it found that persuasion about a situation increased when a person's current emotional state matched the emotional framing of a message. The broader emotion-specificity principle suggests a comparable mechanism that may apply to disgust.

Older discourse has allowed for all emotions to be pushed into one category, but not all emotions push judgement in the same direction.

Emotional appraisal patterns are the specific mental evaluations that an individual's brain makes about an event to determine how they feel about a situation.

INSERT TABLE HERE W/ EVIDENCE

Moderating Factors

• private body consciousness
  • people who are more prone to experience their private bodily sensations show stronger disgust-driven bias
    • An experiment conducted by Schnall et al. (2008) revealed that people who were more aware of their Private Body Consciousness (PBC) were more prone to feelings of disgust and expressing these feelings outwards to the situation at hand.
• type of violation
  • purity vs harm

Practical Implications

• evidentiary admissibility
  • courts allow for the admission of gruesome photographic evidence but findings suggest this may be wrong
    • research shows that people view crimes harsher if exposed to gruesome photos
    • Additionally, Bright & Goodman-Delahunty's (2006) research discusses a person's use of their inner emotional states as a way to reason with information they are being given.
    • In their affective influences model, affect is a judgement-simplifying heuristic device. People generally consult their affective state, meaning they consult their inner emotion to infer a judgement before looking at the facts.
• jury selection
• how evidence is presented

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Conclusion

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• Moral disgust does not come with jurors' judgements, but rather it can measurably shift guilt, certainty, blame attribution and punishment severity.
• This may be stronger for certain people; it cannot just be a blanket claim for all jurors.
• The idea that jurors decide on the basis of facts alone is not psychologically sustainable. The practice of law needs to consider this, rather than seeing emotions as a bias.
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See also

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References

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Alicke, M. D., & Weigel, S. H. (2021). The reasonable person standard: Psychological and legal perspectives. Annual Review of Law and Social Science, 17(1), 123–138.

Bornewasser, M., & Bober, J. (1987). Individual, social group and intergroup behaviour. Some conceptual remarks on the social identity theory. European Journal of Social Psychology, 17(3), 267–276. https://doi-org.ezproxy.canberra.edu.au/10.1002/ejsp.2420170303

Bright, D. A., & Goodman-Delahunty, J. (2006). Gruesome evidence and emotion: Anger, blame, and jury decision-making. Law and Human Behavior, 30(2), 183–202. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10979-006-9027-y

Chapman, H. A., & Anderson, A. K. (2012). Understanding disgust. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1251(1), 62–76. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-6632.2011.06369.x 

DeSteno, D., Petty, R. E., Rucker, D. D., Wegener, D. T., & Braverman, J. (2004). Discrete emotions and persuasion: The role of emotion-induced expectancies. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 86(1), 43–56. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.86.1.43

Ekman, P. (1992). Are there basic emotions? Psychological Review, 99(3), 550–553. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.99.3.550

Fishbein, M., & Ajzen, I. (1975). Belief, attitude, intention, and behavior: an introduction to theory and research. Addison-Wesley Pub. Co.

Lacey, N. (2023). Patrick Devlin, The enforcement of morals (1965). In [Book title] (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003193982-5

Russell, P. S., & Giner-Sorolla, R. (2013). Bodily moral disgust: What it is, how it is different from anger, and why it is an unreasoned emotion. Psychological Bulletin, 139(2), 328–351. https://doi-org.ezproxy.canberra.edu.au/10.1037/a0029319

Schnall, S., Haidt, J., Clore, G. L., & Jordan, A. H. (2008). Disgust as embodied moral judgment. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 34(8), 1096–1109. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167208317771

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