About
Professor Roger Giner-Sorolla completed his undergraduate degree at Cornell University and was awarded his PhD in Social Psychology from New York University in 1996. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Virginia and two year-long contracts, he joined the University of Kent in 2001. He was promoted to Professor in 2013, and has also been Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology since 2016.
Roger is an advocate of transparency in scientific reporting and has written several articles and editorials in support of improved reporting guidelines and pre-registration. He has taught Master's statistics and methodology since 2001 at Kent. He is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and a member of the Society for Experimental Social Psychology.
Research interests
After an early career focused on attitudes components and information processing, Professor Roger Giner-Sorolla's core research interests are currently in moral emotions, specifically the self-condemning emotions of guilt and shame, and the other-condemning ones of anger, contempt and disgust. He studies the related topics of intergroup apologies, dehumanisation, and emotionally driven prejudice. As a side interest, he is pursuing research on the ironic enjoyment of music and other aesthetic experiences.
Abstract:
Dark Triad traits, even if harmless, are still disgusting because of the bad character signals they send
Prof. dr. Roger Giner-Sorolla, University of Kent, England.
Inspired by the person-centred approach to moral judgment, studies have found that bad-moral-character judgment is closely associated with moral disgust, more so than anger; while anger more so than disgust is related to the judgments of acts and their outcomes (Giner-Sorolla & Chapman, 2017; Sabo & Giner-Sorolla, 2017). The present research improved on previous work by using naturalistic cues to bad character rather than "mind-reading" vignettes that directly described characters' bad intention. We reasoned that antisocial Dark Triad traits are often taken as signs of immoral character even in the absence of direct harm to other people. In three experimental vignette studies, we tested the link between bad-moral-character judgment and moral disgust, by manipulating harmful consequences orthogonally with nonharmful Dark Triad signals of bad moral character (mixed between-within designs). We manipulated sadism, shown through joy at others' suffering, in Study 1 (N = 191); narcissism, shown through egotistical behaviour, in Study 2 (N = 180); and Machiavellian use of close others as a means to an end in Study 3 (N = 157). In each study, unlike anger, disgust responded more sensitively to moral agents’ tainted moral character than to harmful consequences. These results shed light on the difference between the two often intertwined moral emotions, and the function of disgust in marking antisocial individuals independently of the consequences of their actions.