Aging and disgust: Is old age associated with harsher moral judgements?

The physical decay of the elderly can cause disgust and social rejection. This social rejection may be a problem for older people leading them to exclusion. However, although the association between old age and disgust has always been dealt with in art, literature, religion and the popular consciousness, recent experimental studies on disgust have not paid it the attention it deserves. To address this need, this paper analyses the strength of this association using two experimental studies. After presenting some central and widely-accepted elements about disgust and its moralising and stigmatising nature, the first study starts with a well-established assumption in experimental literature: disgust, which is a rejection emotion, easily leads to moral disgust, i.e., it provokes harsher moral judgments on those who disgust us. If this is the case, elderly people should be more severely judged than the youth if they do something immoral, disgusting, or both. Our results, however, challenge this assumption, finding that elderly people are judged less harshly. This result is replicated in Study 2 which also shows that the higher the sensitivity to disgust, the harsher the moral judgment, regardless of the age of the vignette actor. However, interaction analysis establishes that less disgust-sensitive participants are more condescending to older people than to younger people. This leads us to think that a greater sensitivity to disgust is a likely source of hostility toward the elderly, and a lesser sensitivity may lead to paternalistic attitudes based on compassion.