Cleansing effects (one can wash one's hands to recover innocence): Its size has been inflated by dubious research practices

Ross, R., Van Aert, R., Van den Akker, O., & Van Elk, M. (2021). The role of meta-analysis and preregistration in assessing the evidence for cleansing effects. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 44, E19. doi:10.1017/S0140525X20000606

Abstract: Lee and Schwarz interpret meta-analytic research and replication studies as providing evidence for the robustness of cleansing effects. We argue that the currently available evidence is unconvincing because (a) publication bias and the opportunistic use of researcher degrees of freedom appear to have inflated meta-analytic effect size estimates, and (b) preregistered replications failed to find any evidence of cleansing effects.

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