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Landy and Goodwin (2015) Confirmed Most of Our Findings Then Drew the Wrong Conclusions

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Perspectives on Psychological Science
2015, Vol. 10(4) 537 –538
© The Author(s) 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/1745691615589078
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With failed replications on various topics getting pub-
lished these days, we were pleased that Landy and
Goodwin’s (2015, this issue) meta-analysis supported
most of the findings we reported in Schnall, Haidt, Clore,
and Jordan (2008). They focused on what Pizarro, Inbar
and Helion (2011) had termed the amplification hypoth-
esis of Haidt’s (2001) social intuitionist model of moral
judgment, namely that “disgust amplifies moral evalua-
tions—it makes wrong things seem even more wrong
(Pizarro et al., 2011, p. 267, emphasis in original).” Like us,
Landy and Goodwin (2015) found that the overall effect
of incidental disgust on moral judgment is usually small
or zero when ignoring relevant moderator variables. Like
us, they found that there appears to be something special
about olfactory inductions—they often work even with-
out requiring moderators. And like us, they found that the
effects of incidental disgust are as strong for nonpurity
violations (such as falsifying a resume) as for purity viola-
tions (such as eating a dead dog).
So you can imagine our puzzlement when Landy and
Goodwin (2015) interpreted their findings as evidence
against our experimental findings (Schnall et al., 2008)
and, more generally, against social intuitionism (Haidt,
2001). The puzzle resolves itself when we examine three
factors that we believe they did not properly consider.
First, the meta-analyses failed to include personality
variables that have been shown to be crucial for the
effect. In our three experiments that did not involve
smell, the amplification effect of incidental physical dis-
gust on moral judgments occurred only for participants
who were generally sensitive to bodily sensations, as
measured by the Private Body Consciousness scale
(Miller, Murphy, & Buss, 1981). Landy and Goodwin did
not include this established moderator variable in their
analyses, nor any of the additional individual difference
moderators that have been documented since then, such
as attentional control (Van Dillen, van der Waal, & van
den Bos, 2012), emotional differentiation (Cameron,
Payne, & Doris, 2013), mindfulness (Sato & Sugiura,
2014), and disgust sensitivity (Ong, Mullette-Gillman,
Kwok, & Lim, 2014). Their failure to find an overall effect
in nonolfactory studies replicates the pattern we reported.
Their reasoning that the relevant analyses were “not fea-
sible” because only some experiments had included
these moderators raises the fundamental question of why
a meta-analysis was conducted on data for which essen-
tial variables had not even been assessed.
Second, Landy and Goodwin (2015) minimized the
importance of one of their own major findings—that for
studies using taste or smell to induce disgust, there was a
clear and robust effect even without considering modera-
tor variables. The special potency of taste and smell may
be due to their direct activation of the anterior insula,
which is one of the major brain regions consistently
implicated in research on visceral effects on cognition
(Damasio, 2003). Given that this whole line of research is
about incidental disgust, not disgust that is directly elic-
ited by a moral infraction, their confirmation that bad
tastes and smells can amplify moral condemnation of
unrelated actions is very clear evidence of the mecha-
nism we previously described. After all, our goal was to
demonstrate the existence of these links, which are
inconsistent with a rationalist account of moral judgment
but are predicted by the social intuitionist model (Haidt,
2001) and by the affect-as-information framework
(Schwarz, 2012; Schwarz & Clore, 1983).
Third, experiments investigating the influence of emo-
tional states on judgment require that participants do not
correctly attribute the induced feeling to its true source
(e.g., Lapate, Rokers, Li, & Davidson, 2014; Schnall,
Abrahamson, & Laird, 2002; Schwarz & Clore, 1983; for a
review, see Schwarz, 2012). If one experiences disgust
while considering a morally questionable action, the
589078PPSXXX10.1177/1745691615589078Schnall et al.Confirmed Findings, Wrong Conclusions
research-article2015
Corresponding Author:
Simone Schnall, University of Cambridge, Department of Psychology,
Downing Street, Office 406, Cambridge, CB2 3EB, United Kingdom
E-mail: ss877@cam.ac.uk
Landy and Goodwin (2015) Confirmed
Most of Our Findings Then Drew the
Wrong Conclusions
Simone Schnall1, Jonathan Haidt2, Gerald L. Clore3, and
Alexander H. Jordan4
1University of Cambridge, United Kingdom; 2New York University Stern School of Business;
3University of Virginia; and 4VA Boston Healthcare System and Boston University School of Medicine
at SUFFOLK UNIV on July 14, 2015pps.sagepub.comDownloaded from
538 Schnall et al.
action is likely to seem disgusting and immoral (at least
for people who are more attentive to bodily states). But
if disgust becomes an object of focus before the morally
questionable act is considered, then interpreting the
affect as a response to the act becomes unlikely. Instead,
induced disgust will either have no effect or the opposite
effect. The disgust can reduce the severity of the moral
judgment when participants’ correct attributions to an
extraneous source make not only the induced disgust
irrelevant, but also any negative affect one experiences
while considering morally ambiguous behavior.
Unfortunately, in misguided attempts to increase rigor,
investigators sometimes include premeasures of mood or
otherwise call attention to participants’ feelings before col-
lecting the dependent measures. For example, one recently
published failure of mood effects included mood assess-
ments before both the mood induction and the dependent
measure (Van Damme & Seynaeve, 2013). Another
included seven mood assessments spread throughout the
procedure (Bruyneel et al., 2013). Because Landy and
Goodwin (2015) did not consider the quality of the
selected studies in this regard—and for unpublished work,
relevant methodological details are not reported—the
resulting effect size estimates are highly unreliable.
In closing, we thank Landy and Goodwin (2015) for
pulling together the rapidly growing literature on inciden-
tal disgust and moral judgment. Their findings increase
our confidence that olfactory disgust has a robust effect
on moral judgments, that the effect of incidental disgust
induced through other sensory modalities hinges largely
on established moderator variables, and that incidental
disgust exaggerates the severity of judgments of purity
and non-purity violations alike (Schnall et al., 2008). Their
findings also support the conclusion drawn by Chapman
and Anderson (2013), who provided a comprehensive
review of research on the role of disgust and morality
using a wide range of methods—far beyond the inciden-
tal disgust technique. We concur with their summary of
the state of the art: “Taken together, these studies con-
verge to support the notion that disgust does play an
important role in morality. We suggest that the time is
now right to address more specific questions regarding
the nature and role of disgust in moral cognition” (p. 322).
Acknowledgments
We thank members of the Cambridge Embodied Cognition and
Emotion Laboratory for valuable feedback.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared that they had no conflicts of interest with
respect to their authorship or the publication of this article.
Funding
Gerald L. Chore wishes to acknowledge funding support from
National Science Foundation Grant BCS-1252079.
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... One might wonder if this resides in the fact that some senses seem more primitively connected to disgust (taste and odor, maybe). This could be explained by observing that taste and smell are more 'visceral' as they directly activate brain regions like the insula (Schnall et al. 2015) or that these modalities seem to be present in newborns (e.g., they show distaste during breastfeeding), whereas physical disgust is shown in children only after toilet training (Rozin, Fallon 1987). However, very recently, some replication studies have questioned the effects of taste (Ghelfi et al. 2020) and smell (Bialek et al. 2020) as well. ...
... These negative findings may depend on many factors, among which the conditions under which the replications were conducted. An important factor is the subjective sensitivity to these elicitors (e.g., how much individuals are prone to feel disgusted by certain odors or taste) (Schnall et al. 2015, Bialek et al. 2020, see also Chapman, Anderson 2013, Liuzza in this issue), a circumstance that recently made experimenters focus on individual disgust sensitivity. Alternatively, this negative effect might be due to some other confounders (e.g., attributing the feeling to its true source, see Schnall et al. 2015 or awareness of the influence of the elicitor on moral judgment, see Ghelfi et al. 2020, or co-occurrence of other emotions, such as anger, see Giner-Sorolla et al. 2018). ...
... An important factor is the subjective sensitivity to these elicitors (e.g., how much individuals are prone to feel disgusted by certain odors or taste) (Schnall et al. 2015, Bialek et al. 2020, see also Chapman, Anderson 2013, Liuzza in this issue), a circumstance that recently made experimenters focus on individual disgust sensitivity. Alternatively, this negative effect might be due to some other confounders (e.g., attributing the feeling to its true source, see Schnall et al. 2015 or awareness of the influence of the elicitor on moral judgment, see Ghelfi et al. 2020, or co-occurrence of other emotions, such as anger, see Giner-Sorolla et al. 2018). ...
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Much like unpalatable foods, filthy restrooms, and bloody wounds, moral transgressions are often described as "disgusting." This linguistic similarity suggests that there is a link between moral disgust and more rudimentary forms of disgust associated with toxicity and disease. Critics have argued, however, that such references are purely metaphorical, or that moral disgust may be limited to transgressions that remind us of more basic disgust stimuli. Here we review the evidence that moral transgressions do genuinely evoke disgust, even when they do not reference physical disgust stimuli such as unusual sexual behaviors or the violation of purity norms. Moral transgressions presented verbally or visually and those presented as social transactions reliably elicit disgust, as assessed by implicit measures, explicit self-report, and facial behavior. Evoking physical disgust experimentally renders moral judgments more severe, and physical cleansing renders them more permissive or more stringent, depending on the object of the cleansing. Last, individual differences in the tendency to experience disgust toward physical stimuli are associated with variation in moral judgments and morally relevant sociopolitical attitudes. Taken together, these findings converge to support the conclusion that moral transgressions can in fact elicit disgust, suggesting that moral cognition may draw upon a primitive rejection response. We highlight a number of outstanding issues and conclude by describing 3 models of moral disgust, each of which aims to provide an account of the relationship between moral and physical disgust. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved).
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