Reexamining the Effect of Gustatory Disgust on Moral Judgment: A Multi-lab Direct Replication of Eskine, Kacinik, and Prinz (2011). Not Replicable

Ghelfi, Eric, Cody D. Christopherson, Heather L. Urry, Richie L. Lenne, Nicole Legate, Mary A. Fischer, Fieke M. A. Wagemans, et al. 2018. “Reexamining the Effect of Gustatory Disgust on Moral Judgment: A Multi-lab Direct Replication of Eskine, Kacinik, and Prinz (2011).” PsyArXiv. December 6. doi:10.31234/osf.io/349pk

Abstract: Eskine, Kacinik, and Prinz’s (2011) influential experiment demonstrated that gustatory disgust triggers feelings of moral disgust. This is a report of a large-scale multi-site direct replication of this study, conducted by participants in the Collaborative Replications and Education Project (CREP). Participants in each sample were randomly assigned to one of three beverage conditions: bitter/disgusting, control, or sweet. After consuming the assigned beverage, participants made a series of judgments indicating the moral wrongness of the behavior depicted in each of six vignettes. In the original study, drinking the bitter beverage led to higher ratings of moral wrongness than drinking the control and sweet beverages. The original authors found that a beverage contrast (bitter versus both control and sweet) was significant among conservative participants and not among liberal participants. In this report, random effects meta-analyses across all participants (N = 1,137 in k = 11 studies), conservative participants (N = 162, k = 3), and liberal participants (N = 648, k = 7) revealed standardized effect sizes that were smaller than reported in the original study. Most were in the opposite of the predicted direction and had 95% confidence intervals containing zero; all were smaller than the effect size the original authors had 33% power to detect. In sum, the overall pattern does not provide strong support for the theory that physical disgust via taste perception contributes to moral disgust. We also discuss limitations including low reliability of the moral judgment measure and low numbers of conservative participants across samples.