“It’s not you, it’s me”: how sensitive an adolescent is to disgust affects their moral judgments

The relationship between disgust sensitivity and negative biases towards creepy faces requires further investigation. Further, little is known about how adolescents use facial appearance to make inferences about the morality of strangers. With this aim, we assess whether disgust sensitivity modulates the effect of the transgressor’s face on the severity of moral judgments in Colombian adolescents. We conducted a preregistered experiment with 105 adolescents participants to test the following hypotheses: H1: Adolescents will evidence more severe moral judgments when the transgression is attributed to a person with a creepy face, H2) Greater disgust sensitivity will be associated with harsher judgements; H3) The association between disgust sensitivity and harsher moral judgments will be especially evident when the moral transgression is attributed to a person with a creepy face. Participants rated the acceptability of 12 moral vignettes, each of which was accompanied by the face of the alleged transgressor (neutral or creepy). Disgust sensitivity was measured by the Disgust Scale–Revised. The findings showed that higher disgust sensitivity was linked to harsher moral judgments, regardless of whether the moral transgression was attributed to a neutral or creepy face. Our results extend previous research on the moral role of disgust sensitivity by documenting this association in adolescents. The study suggests that, under certain conditions, disgust sensitivity plays a more significant role in evaluating moral transgressions than in judging the transgressor themselves with adolescent samples.