People tend to think a man who beats up his unfaithful partner’s cat is less moral than one who beats up his girlfriend if she sleeps with someone else, a new psychological study has found.

However the researchers also said most people thought the act of beating up a woman was worse than beating up a cat.

The reason behind this apparent contradiction seems to be that the two immoral acts tend to provoke slightly different reactions.

Whereas people were more angry than disgusted by domestic violence, they were more disgusted than angry about an attack on a pet.

In a paper in the journal Psychological Science, Professor Hanah Chapman, of Brooklyn College, New York, and Professor Roger Giner-Sorolla, of Kent University in the UK, wrote: “In the woman-beater scenario, participants read about John, who ‘learns that his girlfriend of eight years has been sleeping around with another man. Upon hearing this, John becomes overwhelmed with rage and beats up his girlfriend.’

“In the cat beater scenario, participants read about Robert; the text was the same as in the woman-beater scenario, except that Robert ‘beats up his girlfriend’s cat’ instead of his girlfriend.”

The 87 participants in the study were then asked to rate John and Robert on a number of different character traits such as “who is more sick and twisted, who is more likely to enjoy other peoples’ suffering, and who is more likely to feel empathy for a stranger who is suffering”.

The researchers concluded: “The cat beater’s actions were judged to be less wrong than the woman beater’s actions.

“By contrast, the moral character of the cat beater was judged to be worse than that of the woman beater.”

While people were angry and disgusted by both men, they felt more anger towards John and more disgust towards Robert.

Professor Giner-Sorolla told the Independent that these different emotions led to different reactions to the behaviour.

“The typical reaction of disgust is to withdraw, to avoid the situation, to rid yourself of it,” he said.

“Whereas anger is more complicated and often leads people to attack or confront, no necessarily physically, but verbally.”

Anger might lead people to take action to confront the offender or want them to be punished, but they were less likely to feel this if they felt disgust.

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However Professor Giner-Sorolla said it was possible to be angry with someone you love, but “very hard to be contemptuous or disgusted and still think that person is good”.

“With disgust, it’s almost as if you reject the whole person … it’s sending the message I disapprove of who you are,” Professor Giner-Sorolla said.

In another example, he said people tended to feel angry towards someone working on scaffolding who accidentally dropped a spanner, injuring a passerby, because the worker had been negligent.

But they felt more disgust towards someone who deliberately dropped the spanner but missed the passerby.

Professor Giner-Sorolla said people might not want someone who enjoyed reading or fantasising about violence to be prosecuted as "there’s nothing wrong with that in terms of harming other people".

"But it may betray [that person] has a bad character,” he said.

“You may not want to punish this person, but you may not want that person to be a babysitter.”