Harm Mediates the Disgust-Immorality Link Chelsea Schein University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Ryan S. Ritter University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Kurt Gray University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Many acts are disgusting, but only some of these acts are immoral. Dyadic morality predicts that disgusting acts should be judged as immoral to the extent that they seem harmful. Consistent with this prediction, 3 studies reveal that perceived harm mediates the link between feelings of disgust and moral condemnation— even for ostensibly harmless “purity” violations. In many cases, account- ing for perceived harm completely eliminates the link between disgust and moral condemnation. Analyses also reveal the predictive power of anger and typicality/weirdness in moral judgments of disgusting acts. The mediation of disgust by harm holds across diverse acts including gay marriage, sex acts, and religious blasphemy. Revealing the endogenous presence and moral relevance of harm within disgusting-but-ostensibly harmless acts argues against modular accounts of moral cognition such as moral foundations theory. Instead, these data support pluralistic conceptions of harm and constructionist accounts of morality and emotion. Implications for moral cognition and the concept of “purity” are discussed. Keywords: dyadic morality, ethics, disgust, purity, values Supplemental materials: http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/emo0000167.supp Disgust has long been considered important in morality— both in public discourse and moral psychology. Bioethicist Leon Kass argued against stem cell research and cloning by appealing to the “wisdom of repugnance”(Kass, 1997), and psychologist Paul Cam- eron argued against same-sex marriage by providing a disgusting account of gay sex involving “exchanging saliva, feces, semen and/or blood with dozens of different men each year” (Cameron, 2009, quoted in Nussbaum, 2010, p. 1). Reflecting this societal language of disgust, some scholars suggest a special psychological link between disgust and moral judgment (Horberg, Oveis, Kelt- ner, & Cohen, 2009), but many disgusting acts are not immoral. Conventional heterosexual sex within marriage also involves an exchange of bodily fluids, possible contact with blood, and pun- gent odors, but is seldom judged as immoral. If feelings of disgust are not intrinsically or uniformly linked to moral judgment, then the question is what transforms “gross” into “wrong?” Perhaps harm. Drawing from the theories of dyadic morality (Gray, Young, & Waytz, 2012) and emotion construction (Cameron, Lindquist, & Gray, 2015), we suggest that perceptions of harm mediate the link between feelings of disgust and moral condemnation, even for ostensibly harmless acts. Debates About Disgust, Immorality and Emotion Substantial research links moral condemnation to feelings of disgust—including individual differences (Crawford, Inbar, & Maloney, 2014; Inbar, Pizarro, Knobe, & Bloom, 2009) and experimental manipulations (Inbar, Pizarro, & Bloom, 2012; Terrizzi, Shook, & Ventis, 2010)— but the nature of this asso- ciation is debated (Pizarro, Inbar, & Helion, 2011). One debate involves the scope of disgust, with some advocating for links between disgust and all moral judgment (Schnall, Haidt, Clore, & Jordan, 2008; Wheatley & Haidt, 2005), others restricting the role of disgust to violations of bodily and/or spiritual “purity” (Haidt, 2012; Horberg et al., 2009; Russell & Giner-Sorolla, 2013) and others arguing that disgust is only present for moral violations that contain pathogen cues (Kayyal, Pochedly, Mc- Carthy, & Russell, 2015; Royzman, Atanasov, Landy, Parks, & Gepty, 2014). Another debate involves the power of disgust, with some suggesting that disgust is sufficient for moraliza- tion—turning the nonmoral into immoral (Horberg et al., 2009)—and others suggesting that disgust merely amplifies preexisting moral judgments (Pizarro et al., 2011). Adding to these debates, a recent meta-analysis questions the very link between disgust and moral condemnation: across all published experiments, incidental manipulations of disgust have such a small impact upon moral condemnation as to be statistically nonsignificant after controlling for publication bias This article was published Online First April 21, 2016. Chelsea Schein, Department of Psychology, University of North Caro- lina, Chapel Hill; Ryan S. Ritter, Department of Psychology, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; Kurt Gray, Department of Psychology, Uni- versity of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. For helpful feedback, we thank Keith Payne and Kristen Lindquist. For help with survey design and data collection, we thank Lillian Dillard, Meredith Blumberg, and Madeline Gracie Reinecke. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Kurt Gray, Department of Psychology, University of North Carolina, Campus Box 3270, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3270. E-mail: kurtgray@unc.edu This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly. Emotion © 2016 American Psychological Association 2016, Vol. 16, No. 6, 862– 876 1528-3542/16/$12.00 http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/emo0000167 862