Human-Human Chain of Moral Disgust

An object which has physically contacted with immoral persons is contaminated with the characteristics of the immoral person even only once contact (contagion of moral disgust). Due to that, we refuse and disgusted the object. Previous studies have examined the contagion of moral disgust from person to things, but not been examined the occurrence of contagion from person to person yet. We examined whether the moral disgust would contaminate third parties via physical contact. In the experiment, participants were showed a video that experimenter shook hands and conversations with a murderer or an office worker after evaluating the Japanese version of the Disgust Scale-Revised (DS-R-J). Then participants were asked to do a handshake and conversation with the experimenter, recorded the response time and asked the experimenter impression to assess after the session was over. As results supported our hypothesis, experimenter was evaluated more disgusted by the group which showed murderer handshaking video than the group which showed an office worker handshaking video, suggesting human-human chain of moral disgust.