‘Look not at what is contrary to propriety’: A meta-analytic exploration of the association between religiosity and sensitivity to disgust

Previous research has suggested that disgust sensitivity contributes to moral self-regulation. The relationship between religiosity and disgust sensitivity is frequently explored as a moderator of moral-regulating ideologies, such as conservative and traditional ideologies. However, religiosity is suggested to differ from these in moral attitudes against social dominance and racial prejudice. Psychological theories, such as the societal moral intuition and the evolved hazard-perception models, have proposed that there could be reasons to support a distinct relationship between religiosity and disgust sensitivity. These reasons relate to the intuitive pursuit of spiritual purity and the non-secular transcendental emotional-reward value of moral behaviour for religious individuals. In the present manuscript, we conducted the first dedicated meta-analytic review between religiosity and disgust sensitivity. We analysed a summary of forty-seven experimental outcomes, including 48,971 participants. Our analysis revealed a significant positive association (r = .25) between religiosity and disgust sensitivity. This outcome suggests that sensitivity to disgust could have distinct spiritual purity and moral self-regulatory response value for religious individuals