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OK, I admit it.  I find Donald Trump's character to be pretty, well, disgusting. A new study agrees with me.  It says that a person's character , more so than their actions, determines whether we find immoral acts to be ‘disgusting,’ according to new research in Psychological Science , as reported by newswise.com.  “We wanted to know why moral transgressions can be disgusting even when they don’t involve the kinds of things that typically disgust us, like body products, insects, and rotting foods,” says psychological scientist and study co-author Hanah Chapman of Brooklyn College, the City University of New York. “We found that what drives moral disgust seems to be the character of the transgressor — who they are more so than what they do.” The worse someone’s character is, says Chapman, the more disgusting people typically find them to be. The research was prompted by differing findings regarding how our judgments of moral violations evoke specific emotio...

I guess it shouldn't come as a surprise, but character traits mean more to us than material benefits when we're thinking about how much we like someone. When it comes to making decisions involving others, the impression we have of their character weighs more heavily than do our assessments of how they can benefit us, a team of New York University researchers has found.  “When we learn and make decisions about people, we don’t simply look at the positive or negative outcomes they bring to us—such as whether they gave us a loan or helped us move,” explains Leor Hackel, a doctoral candidate in NYU’s Department of Psychology and the study’s lead author. “Instead, we often look beyond concrete outcomes to form trait impressions, such as how generous a person seems to be, and these impressions carry more weight in our future social decisions." Admit it.  Don't you look deeper into how a person treats you than the $2 they may have given you when you came up sh...

My son shocked me the other day when he said I don't trust most people.  I suppose he's right.  And maybe that means I'm not very intelligent. A new study has shown that intelligent people are more likely to trust, according to medicalnewstoday.com (MNT). They are also better judges of character. As the Web site reports, if you often put your trust in other people, that means you're, well, really smart. In the study,  participants' intelligence levels were measured through a 10-word vocabulary test and an assessment that determined how well participants understood the survey questions. "The researchers found that participants who scored highly on measures of intelligence were more likely to trust others, compared with those who had low scores on intelligence levels," according to MNT. Why? Since s marter individuals are better judges of character, "they tend to develop relationships with people who are less likely to betray them," says...