The Rejection of Moral Taint: An Examination of Magical Contagion Responses

Abstract

The aim of the present thesis is to examine the relationship between moral contagion and disgust, as well as whether moral contagion concerns are expressed as avoidance behaviour. Chapter 1 contains a review of existing findings in the areas of moral contagion, disgust, and the evidence for a relationship between disgust and morality. Three key gaps in the literature were identified. First, it remains unclear whether different types of moral transgressions result in differing levels of avoidance. Second, there is currently limited empirical evidence for a relationship between disgust and moral contagion. Third, although the existing literature has found that people express the desire to avoid objects tainted by a moral transgressor there is currently no behavioural evidence of this effect. Chapter 2 is a systematic review of the moral contagion literature which has been written up for submission to a journal. The results of the reviewed studies provide support for the existence of a moral contagion effect. People show a desire to avoid physical contact with an object contaminated by a moral transgressor. The systematic review highlights two key limitations of the moral contagion literature. First, the literature has thus far failed to isolate a mechanism by which moral contagion operates. Second, none of the studies included a behavioural avoidance outcome. Study 1, reported in Chapter 3, investigated the desire to avoid a contaminated object across a range of transgressions which differed in moral severity. Results show that the severity of the moral transgression was found to have an effect whereby the more morally severe the transgression committed by the previous owner the greater the desire to avoid the tainted object.