Reexamining the Effect of Gustatory Disgust on Moral Judgment: A Multilab Direct Replication of Eskine, Kacinik, and Prinz (2011)
Eric Ghelfi, Cody D. Christopherson, Heather L. Urry, Richie L. Lenne, Nicole Legate, Mary Ann Fischer, Fieke M. A. Wagemans, Brady Wiggins, Tamara Barrett, Michelle Bornstein, Bianca de Haan, Joshua Guberman, Nada Issa, Joan Kim, Elim Na, Justin OʼBrien, Aidan Paulk, Tayler Peck, Marissa Sashihara, Karen Sheelar, Justin Song, Hannah Steinberg, Dasan Sullivan
Abstract
Eskine, Kacinik, and Prinz’s (2011) influential experiment demonstrated that gustatory disgust triggers a heightened sense of moral wrongness. We report a large-scale multisite direct replication of this study conducted by labs in the Collaborative Replications and Education Project. Subjects in each sample were randomly assigned to one of three beverage conditions: bitter (disgusting), control (neutral), or sweet. Then, subjects made a series of judgments about the moral wrongness of the behavior depicted in six vignettes. In the original study ( N = 57), drinking the bitter beverage led to higher ratings of moral wrongness than did drinking the control or sweet beverage; a contrast between the bitter condition and the other two conditions was significant among conservative ( n = 19) but not liberal ( n = 25) subjects. In the current project, random-effects meta-analyses across all subjects ( N = 1,137, k = 11 studies), conservative subjects ( n = 142, k = 5), and liberal subjects ( n = 635, k = 9) revealed standardized overall effect sizes across replications that were smaller than reported in the original study. Some were in the opposite of the predicted direction; all had 95% confidence intervals containing zero, and all were smaller than the effect size the original authors could have meaningfully detected. Results of linear mixed-effects regressions revealed that drinking the bitter beverage led to higher ratings of moral wrongness than did drinking the control beverage but not the sweet beverage. Bayes factor tests revealed greater relative support for the null than for the replication hypothesis. The overall pattern provides little to no support for the theory that physical disgust via taste perception harshens judgments of moral wrongness.