Truths about beauty and goodness: Disgust affects moral but not aesthetic judgments.

Abstract

Aesthetic judgments typically involve assessments of one's own responses and thus are partly or largely subjective. Moral judgments may seem otherwise, but their susceptibility to influence by factors extrinsic to the object of judgment-notably, by irrelevant sensations of disgust-has led some to argue that moral and aesthetic judgments are functionally alike, a view consistent with philosophical arguments and neuropsychological evidence. We examined the behavioral consequences of this view by adapting Eskine, Kacinik, and Prinz's (2011) procedure for studying the effect of disgust on moral judgments. In Study 1, participants drank bitter, sweet, or neutral liquids and rated liking and quality of abstract paintings. To rule out a possible asymmetry in the effect of disgust on negative rather than positive stimuli, we had participants in Study 2 drink bitter or neutral drinks and rate the ugliness and badness of aesthetic violations-Komar and Melamid's abstract paintings using undesirable art elements. Participants also rated the moral wrongness of harm and purity violations, allowing for direct comparison of moral and aesthetic judgments. To rule out concerns that participants failed to engage with abstract artworks, Study 3 used representational paintings with disturbing subject matter. Across all studies, disgust had no effect on aesthetic judgments but reliably increased the severity of moral judgments. Thus we replicate Eskine et al. (2011) while uncovering an important functional distinction between aesthetic and moral judgments, a difference that may reflect a "disinterestedness" in aesthetic evaluations not seen in moral evaluations because of the latter's comparatively practical and action-guiding consequences.

The unexplored territory of aesthetic needs and the development of the Aesthetic Needs Scale

“…Hypothesis H8 concerned the relationship between aesthetic needs and sensitivity to disgust. Although Rabb et al [ 80 ] found that inducing a state of disgust did not influence aesthetic judgement (but did influence moral judgment), no research publication has reported on the relationship between trait disgust and aesthetic needs. We theorized that individuals with high aesthetic needs are also more sensitive to potentially ugly and disgusting experiences [ 34 , 48 ].…”

Aesthetic development in children, adolescents and young adults

“…However, as in Parsons, these results are not found in later stages in our data. The Rabb et al (2016) study shows us that in adults who have drunk a bitter liquid, moral evaluations are worse. However, evaluations of the paintings that represent morally negative scenes are not seen as negative in themselves, providing evidence that in adults there is a differentiation between these two types of judgment: aesthetic and moral.…”

The Aesthetic Responsiveness Assessment (AReA) in Farsi language: A scale validation and cultural adaptation study.

“…Yet, despite the importance of assessing interindividual differences in the intensity of responses to aesthetic stimuli, this aspect is not reflected in previous scales. In addition, the AReA focuses on responses to aesthetic stimuli, excluding responses to nonaesthetic beautiful stimuli such as talent, virtue, or morality, included in both the EBS and ABE, which may operate differently (Came, 2012; Güsewell & Ruch, 2012; Hawley-Dolan & Young, 2013; Rabb et al, 2016; Wang et al, 2015). Another way in which the AReA differs from these previous measures is the inclusion of items that together cover both different content domains such as visual art, dance, and music, as well as different response domains such as affective, cognitive, behavioral, and physiological aspects of how a person responds to a particular stimulus (Brattico et al, 2013; Schlotz et al, 2021).…”