ABSTRACT
Yet, as we argue below, while these ideas may, indeed, be “widely acknowledged [and understood] in the discourse psychology community” (Graesser et al., 2002, p. 230) and beyond,3 they continue to play a relatively minor role in studies of moral cognition. Thus, proponents of pathogen-free (“socio-moral”) disgust (e.g., Scott, Inbar, & Rozin, 2016) have traditionally failed to recognize that expunging pathogen-linked content from the explicit text of a vignette is no guarantee that it will not inferentially inform the thinking of the participants that they employed, with, say, “pathogen-free” descriptions of GMOs (Scott et al., 2016) cuing the thoughts of death, disablement and disease (see Blancke, Van Breusegem, De Jaeger, Braeckman, & Van Montagu, 2015 on the strong inferential link between GMO and disease; see Royzman, Atanasov, Landy, Parks, & Gepty, 2014 for a demonstration of how little genuine “oral” disgust is in evidence when using “purity”-based vignettes that neither contain nor call to mind pathogen-linked content).
