Does background color affect moral judgment? A registered replication report of Zarkadi and Schnall’s (2013) Study 1

Do colored backgrounds lead to polarized judgments? Zarkadi and Schnall (2013) found in their Study 1 that, indeed, exposing participants to a black-and-white (versus other colored) background polarized participants’ judgments in a moral dilemma task. This study supported a moral intuitionist model of moral judgment and lent further support to so-called Conceptual Metaphor Theories (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999).After a large pilot study (n = 12,322) that failed to replicate this effect, we conducted two strict preregistered replications relying on Bayesian sequential analyses. First study ran on a French-speaking sample (min N = 300, max N = 450) indicated that our data supports the [presence/absence] of an effect and/while data from the second study ran on an English-speaking sample (min N = 300, max N = 450) [also/while] [does not support/supports] the presence/absence of an effect. This research [confirms/failed to confirm] the effect of the background color on a moral dilemma evaluation and indicates that color may [not be/be determinative] in moral judgement formations. [There is thus strong evidence for the link between polarized color and judgments/There is therefore no evidence for the effect and we think that this line of research is a dead end].