Disgust Promotes Disposal: Souring the Status Quo Faculty Research Working Paper Series Seunghee Han Carnegie Mellon University Jennifer S. Lerner Harvard Kennedy School Richard Zeckhauser Harvard Kennedy School June 2010 RWP10-021 The views expressed in the HKS Faculty Research Working Paper Series are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of the John F. Kennedy School of Government or of Harvard University. Faculty Research Working Papers have not undergone formal review and approval. Such papers are included in this series to elicit feedback and to encourage debate on important public policy challenges. Copyright belongs to the author(s). Papers may be downloaded for personal use only. www.hks.harvard.edu Disgust disposal efect 1 Running head: DISGUST PROMOTES DISPOSAL Disgust Promotes Disposal: Souring the Status Quo Seunghe Han Carnegie Melon University Jennifer S. Lerner Harvard University Richard Zeckhauser Harvard University Keywords: emotion, disgust, status quo bias, choice, decision making Word Count: 4975 Contact Information Jennifer S. Lerner, Profesor Harvard Kennedy School 79 JFK Street Cambridge, MA 02138 Phone: 617-495-9962 Email: Jennifer_Lerner@harvard.edu Disgust disposal efect 2 Abstract Humans naturaly dispose of objects that disgust them. Is this phenomenon so deeply embedded that even incidental disgust ? i.e., where the source of disgust is unrelated to a posesed object ? trigers disposal? Two experiments were designed to answer this question. Two film clips served as disgust and neutral primes; the objects were routine comodities (boxes of office suplies). Results revealed that the incidental disgust condition powerfuly increased the frequency with which decision makers traded away a comodity they owned for a new comodity (more than doubling the probability in each condition), thereby countering otherwise robust status quo bias (Samuelson & Zeckhauser, 1988). Decision makers were unaware of disgust?s impact. Even when warned to correct for it, they failed to do so. These studies presented real choices with tangible rewards. Their findings thus have implications not only for theories of afect and choice, but also for practical improvements in everyday decisions. Disgust disposal efect 3 Disgust Promotes Disposal: Souring the Status Quo Charles Darwin (1872) defined disgust as ??something revolting, primarily in relations to the sense of taste?? (p. 253). His analysis treated disgust as a basic emotion along with anger, fear, sadnes, and happines (Ekman & Davidson, 1994). Inded, disgust satisfies al the modern criteria of a basic emotion, as articulated by Ekman (1992), encompasing distinctive behavioral, physiological, and expresive components as wel as experiential components. More recent definitions of disgust have stresed its function of trigering rejection of bad- tasting or health-threatening food (e.g., Angyal, 1941; Ekman & Friesen, 1975; Frijda, 1986). Disgust has been asumed to play a role in indicating that a substance should either be avoided or expeled if ingestion has already occurred. Rozin and his coleagues, who have extensively studied the evolution of disgust, extended the concept beyond food-related stimuli by observing that anything that reminds us of our animal origins can elicit disgust (Haidt, McCauley, & Rozin, 1994; Rozin & Falon, 1987; Rozin, Haidt, & McCauley, 2000). These studies find that, in addition to food, as many as eight domains?including body products, animals, sexual behaviors, contact with death or corpses, violations of the exterior envelope of the body, poor hygiene, interpersonal contamination, and certain moral offenses?can elicit disgust. This wide range of physical and social elicitors makes disgust a comon experience in daily life. It also plays a significant role in afecting behaviors. Heath, Bel, and Sternberg (2001) identified disgust as one of the emotions most frequently evoked by contemporary urban legends that propagate through subcultures and drive mas-scale consumer behavior. For example, rumors of food contamination often elicit social panic. Two recent high-impact advertising Disgust disposal efect 4 campaigns drew on disgust to promote public health. First, graphic pictures of smoking related diseases printed on Canadian cigarete packages are reported to have elicited strong disgust from smokers and were corelated with reduced smoking and smoking cesation (Hamond, Fong, McDonald, Brown, & Cameron, 2004). Second, disgust has been succesfully employed in a public campaign for hand washing (Duhig, 2008). The TV advertisements showed mothers and children walking out of bathrooms with a glowing purple pigment on their hands that contaminated everything they touched. The use of soap after using the toilet increased. Considering its widespread role in society, the efects of disgust on people?s everyday choices deserve investigation. To date, however, disgust has received only scant atention in experiments seking to determine its causal role in individual decision making. The present studies examine how disgust afects choices betwen something already posesed and an alternative not yet posesed. Such choices are comon, involving, for example, jobs, significant others, and many physical posesions. Under ordinary circumstances, decision makers faced with this sort of choice reliably favor retaining a status quo over other options This status quo bias (SQB) persists even when a current posesion has been randomly and/or arbitrarily asigned (e.g., Samuelson & Zeckhauser, 1988), and even when retaining the status quo option confers financial cost (e.g., Hartman, Doane, & Woo, 1991). There are strong reasons to hypothesize disgust might counteract SQB. As with the anti- smoking campaign described above, we might asume that when an individual asociates a curent posesion with a disgusting experience, the individual wil view the posesion as les atractive and wil be more likely to replace it. If someone receives a foul-smeling package, she is likely to Disgust disposal efect 5 favor exchanging it for a fresh one. But what if careful thought causes the owner to understand that the disgusting experience should not in fact influence the atractivenes of the posesion? For example, supose the package?s foul smel obviously came from the outside of the box and that the metal object inside was unlikely to be contaminated. Wil the offended owner stil choose to reject the status quo object in favor of an alternative? Alternatively, what if it became clear that the source of the disgust had nothing to do with the package (e.g., it came from being stored in a closet with a dead mouse)? Would disgust stil triger a desire to dispose of one?s posesions? We conjecture that it would. In the present study, we investigate a strong version of the conjectured caryover efect of disgust. Our two experiments present a ?strong? test for the folowing thre reasons. First, we induce disgust in an experimental proces rather than having participants experience it in naturalistic form. We believe this lowers the intensity of disgust relative to what one would find in real life. Second, we use objects that have nothing to do with the source of the disgust. Third, we folow standard procedures from experimental economics, including only decisions with tangible consequences, to motivate participants to make decisions carefuly and strategicaly. Thre Alternative Hypotheses Based on the literature, at least thre alternative hypotheses can be theoreticaly derived to describe the relationship betwen disgust and SQB. We start with the nul. Hypothesis 0: Incidental disgust exerts no influence on SQB. This patern may occur for two very diferent reasons. First, rational decision theory would hold that because incidental disgust is unrelated to the inherent atractivenes of two options, it should have no efect on the choice betwen them (Raifa, 1997). Second, influential Disgust disposal efect 6 theories of afect and judgment (for a review, se Forgas, 2003) would hold that disgust, a negatively valenced emotion, may elicit a generalized devaluation of both present posesions and potential posesions because negative emotions would triger generalized negative judgments across judgment domains. If so, when disgusted, decision makers would simply retain the status- quo because both what they presently have and what they might acquire are diminished in value. If nul Hypothesis 0 is refuted, then Hypotheses 1 and 2 -- which predict efects in oposite directions -- should be tested. Hypothesis 1: Incidental disgust amplifies SQB. This hypothesis derives from the clasic literature on arousal/social facilitation, which shows that increases in general arousal cause individuals to display their dominant response to the stimulus situation (Se, for example, Foster, Witcher, Campel, & Gren, 1998; Zajonc, 1965). Disgust can be considered an emotion that intensifies arousal, if one considers the sympathetic nervous system response on multiple dimensions (Gros & Levenson, 1993; Levenson, Ekman, & Friesen, 1990); therefore, it would amplify the dominant response of retaining a status quo posesion. Hypothesis 2: Incidental disgust counteracts SQB. This hypothesis derives from the apraisal-tendency framework (ATF; Lerner & Keltner, 2001; for update, se Han, Lerner, & Keltner, 2007), which asumes that specific emotions give rise to cognitive and motivational characteristics that can acount for the efect of each emotion on individuals? decisions. The ATF posits that disgust, which revolves around the apraisal theme of being too close to an indigestible object or an idea (for elaboration, se Lazarus, 1991), Disgust disposal efect 7 wil evoke an implicit tendency to dispose of current objects (Frijda, 1986; Rozin, Haidt, & McCauley, 2000). If so, even incidental disgust would motivate decision makers to wish to exchange a status quo comodity for a new comodity. Lerner et al. (2004) hypothesize that disgust wil also evoke an implicit goal to avoid acquiring anything new. However, in our study, the goal to expel should be stronger, because the disgusting event is both physicaly and temporaly more asociated with the status-quo comodity than with the alternative. Thus, disgust would promote disposal of a status quo object, thereby counteracting SQB. If a disgust-disposal efect is found, it would reinforce an emerging literature demonstrating that emotions can profoundly alter otherwise robust regularities of human decision proceses?in the present case, for instance, the preference for a status quo over an alternative (for a review se Loewenstein & Lerner, 2003). Moreover, it would reinforce surprising findings in the literature that even incidental emotions?i.e., emotions trigered by a factor unrelated to the decision at hand?can reverse people?s choices in decisions with real monetary consequences (e.g., Lerner, Smal, & Loewenstein, 2004). In efect, it would add to the growing evidence that emotions have the ability to overpower rational choice proceses, thereby influencing decisions to which they have no normative relevance. We focus exclusively on disgust (as oposed to other negative emotions) because of the interesting questions that arise from the theories outlined above. The hypothesized disposal efect implies that it would contrast with the otherwise robust human tendency to hold on to curent objects, as evidenced in SQB. Finaly, if either of the caryover paterns described is found when incidental disgust is induced, it is likely to be a non-conscious proces. That is, gut felings rather than deliberative Disgust disposal efect 8 procesing would drive the phenomenon. If they do, decision makers wil lack clear insight into the emotional influences on their choice (Wilson & Brekke, 1994). We wil test this conjecture about insight and wil also study whether caling participants? atention to the phenomenon alters their choices. Study 1 Study 1 took the form of a 2 ? 2 betwen-subjects factorial in which the emotion condition was crossed with two comodities. The comodities were a square box and an oblong box of aproximately equal weight and volume (se Figure 1). The participants were told the boxes contained office suplies of equivalent value. 1 We presented undisclosed comodities in generic boxes that apeared equivalent in order to facilitate a clean test of the hypotheses, to ensure the results would generalize, and to clarify the decision proceses of participants, who had litle reason to choose one box over the other. Method Design and participants One-hundred-and-six individuals (54 males, 50 females, 2 unspecified) from a university comunity participated in exchange for a $10 show-up payment. Participants ranged in age from 16 to 29 (M = 20). Participants sat in cubicles and could not se each other. They were given instructions that charged them with two separate tasks, which were combined for convenience. Before they began the first task, participants randomly received either an oblong box or a square box. They were told the contents of the box were theirs to keep for participating in the study (se Figure 1). Disgust disposal efect 9 Emotion induction. Participants were randomly asigned to either a disgust condition or a neutral condition. Disgust-condition participants watched a previously validated (Lerner et al., 2004) video clip portraying a man using a filthy toilet (from the film Trainspotting). Neutral- condition participants watched a previously validated (Lerner et al., 2004) video clip about the Great Barier Ref (from a National Geographic special), a nature documentary selected for its neutral efect on emotions. Imediately after watching their clip, participants in the disgust condition were asked to write about how they would fel if they were in the situation depicted, and participants in the neutral condition were asked to write about their daily activities. Trading decision. To encourage a sense of ownership of the generic boxes, participants were invited to shake their box and gues what kind of ofice suplies the box might contain. Next, participants were given a new box, which they were also invited to shake. They were told that the new box contained a diferent kind of ofice suply that was of equivalent value to that in the old box. Participants were then asked to decide whether to keep the old box or exchange it for the new one. Participants? preferences betwen the status quo (the old box) and the alternative (the new box) were measured using established paradigms in experimental economics (e.g., Knetsch & Sniden, 1984). Manipulation check. Imediately after making the trading decision, participants were asked to report how intensely they felt each of 20 emotions. Four negative emotions were of primary interest: anger, sadnes, fear, and disgust. Final questionnaire. Participants also typed a response to an open-ended question: Why did you choose to exchange/kep the box you were given? These responses were coded by research asistants. Finaly, participants answered demographic questions. While participants Disgust disposal efect 10 completed the questionnaire, the experimenter exchanged boxes for those who chose to trade. Participants kept the contents of their boxes, which pilot tests revealed to be moderately pleasing. Results Manipulation checks Emotions were efectively induced, both in magnitude and specificity. Specificaly, neutral-condition participants reported feling significantly more neutral than disgusted (M n = 3.72 versus M d = 0.24), t (52) = 10.44, p < .001. Disgust-condition participants reported feling significantly more disgusted than neutral (M d = 5.54 versus M n = 2.32), t (52) = 6.49, p < .001. They also reported feling significantly more disgust than the other primary negative emotions: anger (M a = 0.87, SD = 1.17) and sadnes (M s = 1.02, SD = 1.53). Main analyses Trading propensities. The data were analyzed using logistic regresions. Regardles of which comodity was randomly chosen to serve as the status quo, disgust-condition participants were significantly more likely (50.9%) to trade away their status-quo comodity than were neutral-condition participants (32.1%). The diference was significant: Wald ? 2 (1, N = 106) = 4.778, p < .05, ? = .21. Note the significant status quo bias in the neutral condition; les than a third of these participants traded away their item. Comparing the two box conditions, it is worth pointing out that participants were les wiling to trade away the oblong box than the square box, sugesting an unpredicted preference for the oblong box, other factors held equal (se Table 1). A critical baseline finding for us, however, is that the diference in the propensity to trade was virtualy identical across the two types of boxes. Disgust disposal efect 11 Support for main hypothesis. Our results reject Hypotheses 0 and 1, and suport Hypothesis 2. Relative to a neutral state, incidental disgust makes decision makers more likely to exchange a status quo comodity for a new comodity. This statisticaly significant efect of disgust on choice remained the same even when self-reported anger was entered in the equation as a covariate ? 2 (1, N=106) = 4.871, p < .05. The same was true when sadnes ? 2 (1, N=106) = 4.649, p < .05, or anger and sadnes together ? 2 (1, N=106) = 4.888, p < .05, were entered as covariates. These results indicate that other negative emotions measured in the study, sadnes and anger, did not explain additional variance in the observed disgust efect. Disgust thereby counteracts SQB. The efect size was substantial (? = .21), as reported above. Disgust more than doubled the propensity to exchange (oblong box) and raised it by more than half (square box), in acordance with the ATF prediction. Rationales for choices. Participants? explanations for choosing their prefered box were coded; the explanations conveyed no awarenes of emotional caryover. Apart from ?random choice,? the most common rationales for choosing a box were: ?makes a more interesting noise,? (21%) ?fels more useful,?(28%) and ?fels heavier.?(21%) Discusion Study one, using two virtualy generic comodities, found that disgust can drive choice even when decision makers have no good reason to prefer one item over another. Perhaps surprisingly, participants reported no influence of disgust on their choices, but identified other barely relevant characteristics as influences. Disgust disposal efect 12 Study 2 Caryover efects of disgust were solidly established in Study 1. To gauge the potential importance of the phenomenon, Study 2 sought to examine whether decision makers can self- corect for it when made aware of the posible caryover efects. Wilson and Brekke?s authoritative review (1994) of judgment and decision biases identifies four factors necesary for bias correction: 1) awarenes of unwanted procesing; 2) awarenes of direction and magnitude of the bias; 3) motivation to correct bias; 4) ability to adjust response. Study 2 wil provide the first thre of these factors in an efort to observe whether decision makers can adjust their responses. If, after providing al thre factors, we observe no caryover, then we can conclude that disgusted decision-makers are inded able to correct the caryover. The phenomenon may hold les import if it is easily corrected. We hypothesize, however, that the caryover of disgust wil remain. If correcting the disgust-disposal efect requires mentaly disentangling the incidental disgust prime from the choice objects, then the disgust-disposal efect, which semed to be driven by gut felings rather than deliberative procesing, is unlikely to be corrected even when decision makers? atention is caled to the phenomenon. Thus, we propose: Hypothesis 3: An otherwise efective warning wil not negate the disgust-disposal efect. Method Study 2 took the form of a 2 ? 2 betwen-subjects factorial in which the emotion condition was crossed with a warning. We made the oblong box the status quo, thus avoiding consideration of a further experimental factor (in Study 1, the results for both boxes suported Hypothesis 2). Moreover, since the oblong box produced a higher ratio of trade behavior Disgust disposal efect 13 betwen the disgust and neutral conditions, it alowed more potential to find a warning efect for disgust. Design and participants One-hundred-and-twenty university students (74 males, 45 females, 1 unspecified) participated in exchange for clas credit. Participants? ages ranged from 18-25 (M = 20). Procedures matched those of Study 1, except as noted. Warning. After the emotion induction and before making their choices, half the participants received the folowing writen warning regarding emotional caryover from the film clip they had just sen: Watching film clips in the first part of the study can bias choices in the second part. Specificaly, having just sen an unpleasant film can increase your desire to get rid of things you have in your posesion. Likewise, having just sen a pleasant film clip can increase your desire to keep things you have in your posesion. Because we are interested in studying how people can avoid being biased, please try your absolute best to avoid having any influence of the film clip on your decisions about the box! Give us your honest choice, reflecting your own felings about the box, regardles of the film clip you viewed. In the warning, the films were refered to as ?pleasant? and ?unpleasant,? corresponding to the neutral and disgust conditions respectively. 2 The warning specified the direction of potential bias: pleasant films (neutral condition) create a bias toward retaining the object posesed, whereas unpleasant firms (disgust condition) create a bias toward geting rid of the object. Everyone in a warning condition received the text above. Trading decision. Following Study 1?s methods, subjects were then given the second box, alowed to handle/shake it, and asked whether they wished to make a trade. 3 Results Disgust disposal efect 14 Manipulation check Emotion inductions were efective in magnitude and specificity. Neutral-condition participants reported feling significantly more neutral than disgusted (M n = 3.30 versus M d = 0.43 respectively), t (60) = 3.07, p = .003. Disgust-condition participants reported feling significantly more disgusted than neutral (M d = 3.68 versus M n = 2.37 respectively), t (58) = 6.49, p < .001. Disgust-condition participants also reported feling significantly more disgust than any other measured negative emotion, including anger and sadnes. These results were consistent with Study 1. The warning was noted by participants: 91.7% said they remembered the warning about the posible biasing efects of the film, and 87.2% said the warning was believable. Main analyses The data were analyzed using logistic regresions. In the no-warning (control) conditions, Study 1?s patern was replicated. Consistent with the main hypothesis, disgust-condition participants were much more likely (33.3%) to trade away their status-quo comodity than were neutral-condition participants (13.8%). In the warning condition, the predicted asymetric patern emerged. As was required for this test to be meaningful, neutral-condition participants heeded the warning, thus establishing apropriate conditions for the test of Hypothesis 3. That is, neutral-condition participants (who were warned that the clip would bias them toward retaining their comodity) adjusted their choices as instructed, trading more frequently in the warning condition (M n no-warning = 13.8%, M n warning = 37.5%), Wald ? 2 (1, N = 61) = 4.127, p < .05, ? = .26. Disgust disposal efect 15 Our prime interest was the efect of the warning (that the clip would bias them toward trading away their comodity) on disgust-condition participants. We predicted a modest efect at best, and that is what we found. Participants traded at the same rate independent of the warning manipulation (M d no-warning = 33.3%, M d warning = 31.0%), Wald ? 2 (1, N = 59) = 0.36, se Table 2). This result suports Hypothesis 3; namely, even warnings that are efective elsewhere do not negate the disgust-disposal efect. 4 As in Study 1, 90% of the participants in the disgust condition, whether warned or not, reported that viewing the unpleasant movie clip could not have influenced their own preferences. Yet because of the clip, both warned and unwarned groups increased their propensity to trade. As a check on reliability, a descriptive set of analyses compared trading from Study 1 with trading levels in Study 2. In order to create a clean, unconfounded comparison, we included only the conditions in Study 1 that had an oblong box as the initial posesion (Study 2 used only oblong boxes). As expected, comparing the trading level for the disgust condition across studies yielded no significant diferences (42.3% in Study 1 versus 33.3% in Study 2). Also as expected, comparing the trading level for the neutral condition yielded no significant diferences (21.1% in Study 1 versus 13.8% in Study 2). Discusion To recap, neutral-condition decision makers heeded the warning and engaged in substantialy more trades when warned. 5 By contrast, disgust-condition decision makers traded away their status-quo comodity at the same rate whether or not they were warned against caryover efects. This evidence suports our conjecture that the disgust-disposal efect Disgust disposal efect 16 operates at such a basic level that it persists even in the presence of measures that would normaly diminish them. 6 The robust efect of incidental disgust observed here may apear at odds with previous findings sugesting that incidental emotion efects tend to be fragile and often go away once an individual?s atention is drawn to the potential bias. For example, Schwarz & Clore (1983) found that when an individual?s atention was drawn to weather, its efect on subjective wel-being disapeared. It should be pointed out, though, that whereas people might readily admit the efect of sunny weather on their sense of wel-being, they might be unwiling to admit, whether to themselves or others, the efect of irelevant disgust on the choice betwen the two objects. In fact, participants in the present study reported that while the warnings made sense, they did not believe that their own choice betwen the two boxes was influenced by watching the disgusting film clip. That is, the warning did not match participants? awarenes of their subjective experience. Thus, unlike in the afect-as-information tradition (e.g., Schwarz & Clore, 1983), the warnings here were unlikely to have ben acknowledged and heded ? a diference that we speculated about above and that merits future examination. General Discusion Incidental felings of disgust cary over to promote the disposal of curently owned objects unrelated to the induced disgust, and thus counteract SQB. We cal this the disgust- promotes-disposal efect. The efect is substantial. Across studies and conditions, disgusted people were betwen 55% and 141% more likely to dispose of a present posesion than were people in an unwarned neutral state. A warning that changed behavior for those in the neutral state did not diminish the disgust-promotes-disposal efect. Interestingly, disgust-condition Disgust disposal efect 17 participants denied any influence of the disgust-inducing agent (a film clip) on their choices. Rather, they atributed their choices to rational, deliberative preferences, such as a fondnes for oblong boxes. This finding is consistent with the ATF hypothesis that, through a subconscious proces, disgust trigers the implicit goal to dispose of current posesions and thus counteracts SQB. The results add empirical evidence to the growing body of work demonstrating that specific emotions have a powerful efect on choices. Is the efect specific to disgust? One may wonder whether the observed efect is specific to disgust or whether it applies to negative emotions in general. As was demonstrated in the manipulation check data, the disgust induction elicited discrete felings of disgust rather than general negativity. It did not make participants either angry or sad. As an additional check, further analysis revealed that other negative emotions measured in the study, sadnes and anger, do not explain additional variance in the observed disgust efect. Therefore, it apears that the increased disposal of the status quo object observed in the current studies is atributable to disgust and not to other negative emotions. The posibility remains that other emotions may be able to produce a similar efect on SQB. If so, we suspect that this would ocur through a diferent mechanism. For example, one could hypothesize that anger may counteract SQB. Anger is asociated with relative left frontal hemispheric activation in the brain ? a patern characteristic of aproach motivation (Harmon- Jones, 2003). Anger may motivate decision makers to take actions and exchange current objects. In a diferent realm, one could hypothesize that social disgust (e.g., disgust over imoral action) may produce the same efect as physical disgust. (For a comprehensive review of diferent kinds of disgust, se Rozin, Haidt, & McCauley, 2000.) Data from an f-MRI study Disgust disposal efect 18 suport this speculation. Increased activation in the anterior insula, a brain structure known to be involved in the experience of physical disgust (Philips et al., 1997; Wicker et al., 2003), predicted participants? decisions to reject unfair ofers from their partners (Sanfey, Riling, Aronson, Nystrom, & Cohen, 2003). This sugests that social disgust may in fact share the same neural mechanisms as physical disgust, and thus may produce the same efect. These interesting posibilities are beyond the scope of this paper and wil hopefully be examined in future studies. Is the efect strong enough to reverse SQB? One might wonder whether the disgust efect has the potential to be strong enough to reverse SQB, which has generaly been shown to be substantial. The question of whether disgust would reverse or merely reduce SQB depends on the strength of both efects. Our disgust induction was modest in thre respects: (a) it was generated by a movie that was tangentialy related (at most) to the posesed object; (b) there was no taste or smel asociated with the disgust induction, sensations that would likely increase the level of disgust; and (c) the object itself was neutral and in no way connected to items that might induce disgust, such as food. If the object had ben related to consumption rather than office suplies, the disposal efect might have ben much greater. It might even have ben greater if participants had viewed the office suplies rather than being presented with them in a sealed box. Therefore, even though we only observed reductions in SQB, we do not rule out a posibility that in other contexts disgust could cause a reversal in SQB. Practical Implications The finding that disgust promotes disposal has real-world implications that range from the minor to the monumental. In a broad aray of cases, people?s propensity to stick with the Disgust disposal efect 19 status quo could be powerfuly counteracted by felings of incidental disgust. In practice, the link betwen disgust and disposal wil be more comon when disgust is integral rather than incidental to the decision at hand, though more dificult to isolate. Thus, a senior citizen who bathes insufficiently may suffer more social isolation than mere foul smel would sem to merit, perhaps acelerating a health decline via lack of social suport (e.g., Hegelson & Cohen, 1996). Similarly, a cancer patient who is nauseated by chemotherapy drugs may be too inclined to switch to alternative treatments, to her detriment. Transcending theoretical models of emotion and decision making, the implications of our findings aply to many of life?s choices. Disgust disposal efect 20 References Angyal, A. (1941). Disgust and related aversions. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 26, 393-412. Darwin, C. R. (1965). The Expresion of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Chicago: University of Chicago Pres. (Original work published 1872). Duhig, C. (2008, July 13). Warning: Habits maybe good for you. The New York Times. Ekman, P. (1992). An argument for basic emotions. Cognition and Emotion, 6, 169-200. Ekman, P., & Davidson, R. J. (1994). The nature of emotion: Fundamental questions. New York, NY: Oxford University Pres. Ekman, P., & Friesen, W. V. (1975). Unmasking the face. New York: Prentice Hal. Forgas, J. P. (2003). Afective influences on atitudes and judgments. In R. J. Davidson, K. R. Scherer & H. H. Goldsmith (Eds.), Handbook of Afective Science (p. 596-218). New York: Oxford University Pres. Foster, C. A., Witcher, B. S., Campbel, W. K., & Gren, J. D. (1998). Arousal and atraction: Evidence for automatic and controlled proceses. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74, 86-101. Frijda, N. H. (1986). The emotions. New York: Cambridge University Pres. Gros, J. J., & Levenson, R. W. (1993). Emotional supresion: Physiology, self-report, and expresive behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 64(6), 970-986. Disgust disposal efect 21 Haidt, J., McCauley, C. R., & Rozin, P. (1994). Individual diferences in sensitivity to disgust: A scale sampling seven domains of disgust elicitors. Personality and Individual Diferences, 16, 701-713. Hamond, D., Fong, G. T., McDonald, P. W., Brown, S., & Cameron, R. (2004). Graphic Canadian cigarete warning labels and adverse outcomes: evidence from Canadian smokes. American Journal of Public Health, 94(8), 1442-1445. Han, S., Lerner, J.S. & Keltner, D. (2007). Felings and consumer decision making: Extending the Apraisal-Tendency Framework. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 17, 184-187. Harmon-Jones, E. (2003). Clarifying the emotive funtions of asymetrical frontal cortical activity. Psychophysiology, 40, 838-848. Hartman, R., Doane, M. J., & Woo, C. (1991). Consumer rationality and the status quo. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 106(1), 141-162. Heath, C., Bel, C., & Sternberg, E. (2001). Emotional selection in memes: the case of urban legends. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81(6), 1028-1041. Helgeson, V. S., & Cohen, S. (1996). Social suport and adjustment to cancer: Reconciling descriptive, correlational, and intervention research. Health Psychology, 15, 135-148. Knetsch, J. L. (1989). The endowment efect and evidence of nonreversible indiference curves. American Economic Review, 79(5), 1277-1284. Knetsch, J. L., & Sniden, J. A. (1984). Wilingnes to pay and compensation demanded: Experimental evidence of an unexpected disparity in measures of value. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 99, 507-521. Disgust disposal efect 22 Lazarus, R. S. (1991). Emotion and adaptation. New York: Oxford University Pres. Lerner, J. S., Dahl, R. E., Hariri, A. R., & Taylor, S. E. (in pres). Facial expresions of emotion reveal neuroendocrine and cardiovascular stres responses. Biological Psychiatry. Lerner, J. S., Smal, D. A., & Loewenstein, G. F. (2004). Heart strings and purse strings: Caryover efects of emotions on economic decisions. Psychological Science, 15(5), 337- 341. Lerner, J. S., & Keltner, D. (2001). Fear, anger, and risk. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81(1), 146-159. Lerner, J. S., & Tiedens, L. Z. (2006). Portrait of the angry decision maker: How apraisal tendencies shape anger's influence on cognition. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 19, 115-137. Levenson, R. W., Ekman, P., & Friesen, W. V. (1990). Voluntary facial action generates emotion- specific autonomic nervous system activity. Psychophysiology, 27(4), 363-384. Loewenstein, G., & Lerner, J. S. (2003). The role of afect in decision making. In R. Davidson, K. Scherer & H. Goldsmith (Eds.), Handbook of Afective Science (p. 619-642). London: Oxford University Pres. Morales, A. C., & Fitzsimons, G. J. (2007). Product Contagion: Changing Consumer Evaluations Through Physical Contact with 'Disgusting' Products, Journal of Marketing Research, 44, 272-283. Raifa, H. (1997). Decision Analysis: Introductory Lectures on Choices Under Uncertainty. McGraw-Hil Colege Custom Series. Rozin, P., & Falon, A. (1987). A perspective on disgust. Psychological Review, 94, 23-41. Disgust disposal efect 23 Rozin, P., Haidt, J., & McCauley, C. (2000). Disgust. In M. Lewis & J. Haviland (Eds.), Handbook of emotions (2 nd ed., p.637-653). New York: Guilford Pres. Samuelson, W., & Zeckhauser, R. (1988). Status quo bias in decision making. Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, 1, 7-59. Sanfey A.G., Riling J. K., Aronson, J. A., Nystrom, L. E., & Cohen, J. D. (2003). The neural basis of economic decision-making in the Ultimatum Game. Sceince, 300, 1755-1758. Schnal, S., Haidt, J., Clore, G., & Jordan, A. (2008). Disgust as embodied moral judgment. Personality and Social Psychology Buletin, 34, 1096-1109. Schwarz, N., & Clore, G. L. (1983). Mood, misatribution and judgments of wel-being: Informative and directive functions of afective states. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 45(3), 513-523. Tiedens, L. Z., & Linton, S. (2001). Judgment under emotional certainty and uncertainty: The efects of specific emotions on information procesing. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81, 973-988. Wheatley, T., & Haidt, J. (2005). Hypnoticaly induced disgust makes moral judgments more severe. Psychological Science, 16, 780-784. Wilson, T. D., & Brekke, N. (1996). Mental contamination and mental correction: Unwanted influences on judgments and evaluations. Psychological Buletin, 116(1), 117-142. Zajonc, R. B. (1965). Social facilitation. Science, 149, 269-149. Disgust disposal efect 24 Authors? Note Grants from the National Institute for Mental Health (MH62376) and the National Science Foundation (PECASE SES0239637; SES0820441) awarded to Jennifer S. Lerner suported this research. We thank Dan Feiler, Bil Mangan, and Sarah Schol for research asistance. We thank David DeSteno and Yoel Inbar for coments on an earlier draft. Disgust disposal efect 25 Footnotes 1. In a pilot study where a sporty water botle and a highlighter set were used as the status- quo and alternative comodities, 39% of disgust-condition participants traded away the status-quo comodity, whereas only 11% of neutral-condition participants traded it away, ? 2 (1, N = 41) = 4.04, p < .05, ? = .31. 2. These particular terms were used for two reasons: (1) withholding a label for the target emotion (disgust) reduced demand characteristics asociated with it; and (2) pilot testing for the warning revealed that even though participants subjectively experienced the neutral film (coral ref) as neutral, they verbaly refered to the neutral film as a ?pleasant film? rather than as a ?neutral film? because they were not acustomed to thinking of a film as ?neutral.? 3. There was one diference. In Study 1, participants hung up a card saying ?Trade? if they wished to do so. Study 2 made this format more balanced by giving them a second card saying ?Kep? to hang if that was their prefered action. 4. An alternative explanation is that decision makers in the disgust condition eschewed the warning because they were angry at the experimenter for making them watch the unpleasant film clip. This idea was empiricaly tested and received no suport. On a scale of 0 to 8, where 0 meant not experiencing the emotion at al, decision makers in both the disgust and neutral condition reported experiencing almost no anger whatsoever (M n = 0.51, M d = 0.86). 5. The efectivenes of the warning is notable, as there is no reason to believe that pleasant films do promote SQB. Disgust disposal efect 26 6. Another posibility is that incidental disgust may have promoted felings of certainty that inhibited the careful cognitive efort needed to inhibit the disgust-promotes-disposal efect. Specific emotions are reliably asociated with particular sets of apraisals along such conceptual dimensions as pleasantnes, control, responsibility, and certainty (Roseman, 1984; Scherer, 1982; Smith & Elsworth, 1985; Smith & Lazarus, 1983). In the case of disgust, people tend to strongly experience apraisals of certainty, in addition to apraisals along other dimensions (e.g., negative experience). That is, they have a sense of knowing as oposed to a sense that they should question themselves. Directly relevant to the present study, emotions characterized by a sense of certainty have ben shown to promote heuristic cognitive procesing rather than systematic cognitive procesing (Tiedens & Linton, 2001). If corecting the disgust-disposal efect requires carefuly disentangling the incidental disgust prime from the choice objects, then corection should be les likely to occur among disgusted participants who engage in heuristic procesing due to their heightened sense of certainty than among those in a neutral state. Disgust disposal efect 27 Table Captions Table 1. Propensities to Trade Away Status-Quo Object in Study1 Status-Quo Object Neutral Condition Disgust Condition Diference Oblong Box 21.1% 42.3% 21.2% Square Box 38.2% 59.3% 21.1% Across the Two Boxes 32.1% 50.9% 18.8% Table 2. Propensities to Trade Away Status-Quo Object in Study 2 Choice Emotion Condition De-Bias Condition Kep Trade No Warning 86.2% 13.8% Neutral Warning 62.5% 37.5% No Warning 66.7% 33.3% Disgust Warning 69.0% 31.0% Disgust disposal efect 28 Figure Captions Figure 1. The square and oblong boxes used in the studies