What's the verdict: how disgust dictates jury verdict and the mitigating role of symbolic cleansing

Abstract

Approximately 1% of the US prison population (about 20,000 individuals) is currently wrongfully convicted (The Innocence Project, 2023). Wrongful convictions are influenced by ambiguous evidence, cognitive heuristics, and moral emotions, which affect legal decision-making (Baldwin & McConville, 1979). The present study assessed the effect of disgust-inducing and cleansing images on mock jury guilt ratings. One hundred fifty-two participants were randomly assigned to one of four conditions: disgust-inducing and cleansing images, disgust-inducing images only, cleansing images only, and no images. Participants read an ambiguous vignette about a crime and battery charge, then rated the defendant’s guilt on a 7-point Likert scale. The findings showed, in a marginal effect, that exposure to cleansing images following disgust-inducing images resulted in lower guilt ratings, indicating that moral cleansing mitigates heuristics formed by the vignette and disgust-inducing images. The decreased guilt ratings in the group exposed to both cleansing and disgust-inducing images demonstrate the role of symbolic cleansing in moral restoration and reaffirm the link between moral self-assessment restoration and reduced feelings of disgust (Schaefer, 2019). Future studies should explore the impact of more arousing media and different forms of symbolic cleansing to determine how moral cleansing might influence pathogen avoidance responses and lead to fairer sentencing in the criminal justice system.