Disgust Cubed: the Effect of Pathogen, Moral, and Sexual Disgust on Product Evaluations, Avoidant Behaviour, and Attributions
Year: 2011
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Recent research on emotions has begun to distinguish independent domains within a single emotion.In line with this approach, the present thesis attempts to demonstrate that the emotion of disgust can be broken into three independent subdomains, and that each domain has a separate implications for the study of consumer behaviour.Research in marketing has started to unveil the role of disgust in consumer decision making.Chiefly, it has demonstrated that consumer evaluations are more negative for contaminated (versus uncontaminated) products, and that the mechanism behind this effect appears to be the activation of disgust.Throughout the marketing literature, disgust is treated as a domain-general, unitary construct.In other words, no distinctions are drawn between different types of disgust.However, evolutionary models of disgust have revealed that individuals differ in their sensitivity to disgust across three independent domains (pathogen, sexual, and moral).Across two studies, we examine the effects of pathogen, moral and sexual disgust on product evaluations (study 1) and person attributions (study 2).We hypothesize that each domain of disgust should elicit domain-specific avoidance strategies, and this effect will be moderated by individual differences in domain-specific sensitivity to disgust.
Author: Zack Mendenhall
Language: English
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2164298014