Most scientists agree that the emotion disgust evolved to help guard against infectious disease threats – think of disgust toward spoiled foods or vomit. “But people also seem to naturally and intuitively experience disgust toward crooked politicians, greedy landlords, and friends-turned-foes,” Joshua Tybur explains. Scientists have yet to fully understand this connection between disgust and morality.
The Dutch Research Council (NWO) decided to award a Vici grant to Tybur for the project Moral Disgust: A Cognitive Science Perspective (MORDISGUST). “In this project, we will examine disgust toward moral transgressions across dozens of countries with diverse cultures, languages, and moral values”, says Tybur “Results will help us better understand how disgust impacts moral judgments, and how moral judgments impact disgust.”
Whereas much of Tybur’s earlier research has focused on pathogen disgust, this project will focus on disgust evoked by moral transgressions unrelated to pathogens. “This phenomenon has posed a real puzzle to affective scientists, moral psychologists, and philosophers,” he notes. “I have watched a debate about the nature (and even existence) of moral disgust roil in the literature for decades, but I’ve seen little progress emerge from that debate. This project is aimed at moving this field forward - if not also decisively answering multiple outstanding questions.”
Tybur is a Professor of Psychology and Infectious Disease in the Department of Experimental and Applied Psychology at VU Amsterdam, where he has worked since 2011. His work is broadly focused on understanding how people have evolved and learn to navigate the threats and opportunities posed by social living. In his earlier work funded by ERC Starting and ERC Consolidator grants, he blended approaches from social psychology, personality psychology, cognitive psychology, cross-cultural psychology, behavioural genetics, and evolutionary biology, largely to understand how minds and cultures have evolved to deal with pathogen threats. Read more about his work on his website.
“For years, VU Social Psychology has been making progress toward understanding the intersections between trust, emotion, cooperation, and morality,” says Tybur. “Resources provided by the Vici will allow us to advance these research lines even further. The project will also push two of our current strengths - cross-cultural research and open science - into new directions.” The Vici project will include four cross-cultural studies, each sampling from twenty countries, and empirical papers from the project will be published as registered reports.
The Vici grant from NWO is targeted at outstanding senior researchers who have successfully demonstrated the ability to develop their own innovative lines of research, and to act as coaches for young researchers.
