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We often say our sense of聽morality聽is guided by our gut feelings 鈥� and this may be truer than we realise. A set of experiments using the anti-nausea powers of ginger have provided the strongest evidence yet that bodily sensations play a key role in some of our moral judgements.

Previous studies have reported that the more disgusted people feel, the more wrong they judge moral infractions to be. However, it鈥檚 not clear whether feelings of聽disgust聽guide moral judgements, or if it is the other way around.

To find out, Jessica Tracy and her colleagues at the University of British Columbia, Canada, carried out a series of experiments using ginger, which has anti-nausea effects. Half the volunteers were given ginger in capsules and half were given placebos, without knowing which.

In the first test, 242 subjects were shown disgusting photos and then asked to rate how disgusted they felt. Ginger reduced feelings of disgust towards moderately disgusting photos, such as snot in a napkin, but not highly disgusting photos, such as vomit in a toilet.

This is the first evidence that treatments that target physical feelings of nausea also help alleviate psychological feelings of disgust, suggesting that physical queasiness contributes to how we feel about a picture.

Next, the researchers asked subjects how wrong they considered certain acts. Initially, they focused on so-called 鈥減urity violations鈥� 鈥� situations that include touching dead bodies or faecal matter. 鈥淚n human cultures throughout history, moralising about these things was an effective way to prevent people from engaging in behaviours that would transmit germs,鈥� says Tracy.

Milder judgements

They found that, when people were given ginger, they made less harsh judgements about moderate purity violations, such as drinking from a never-used toilet bowl. But like in the first experiment, the ginger wasn鈥檛 enough to curb reactions to more extreme scenarios, such as sex between cousins.

In the team鈥檚 final test, 504 subjects were questioned about a broader set of moral issues, such as fairness, loyalty and authority. They found that ginger didn鈥檛 have a significant effect on how people judged any of these issues.

鈥淭his provides pretty good evidence that when we make moral judgements about purity, part of what we鈥檙e doing is thinking about how sick we feel,鈥� says Tracy.

Ginger may not have affected the severe violations because they are so strongly ingrained as wrong by cultural norms that we don鈥檛 need to consider our gut feelings, she says. But for questions that are less clear-cut, bodily sensations appear to play an important role in our judgements of them.

鈥淓motions clearly happen in the body. The question is to what extent what happens in the body also changes what happens in the mind,鈥� says Simone Schnall at the University of Cambridge.

鈥淭his work demonstrates that gut feelings can influence the way people think about very abstract social issues that we typically would consider to be driven by more rational considerations, namely moral topics,鈥� says Schnall.