Reexamining the effect of gustatory disgust on moral judgment: A multi-lab direct replication of Eskine, Kacinik, and Prinz (2011)

Eskine, Kacinik, and Prinz’s (2011) influential experiment demonstrated that gustatory disgust triggers a heightened sense of moral wrongness. We report a large-scale multi-site direct replication of this study conducted by participants in the Collaborative Replications and Education Project. Participants in each sample were randomly assigned to one of three beverage conditions: bitter/disgusting, control, or sweet. Then, participants made a series of judgments indicating the moral wrongness of the behavior depicted in each of six vignettes. In the original study (N = 57), drinking the bitter beverage led to higher ratings of moral wrongness than drinking the control and sweet beverages; a beverage contrast was significant among conservative (N = 19) but not liberal (N = 25) participants. In this report, random effects meta-analyses across all participants (N = 1,137 in k = 11 studies), conservative participants (N = 142, k = 5), and liberal participants (N = 635, k = 9) revealed standardized effect sizes 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 most were smaller than the effect size the original authors could meaningfully detect. In linear mixed-effects regressions, drinking the bitter beverage led to higher ratings of moral wrongness than drinking the control beverage but not the sweet beverage. Bayes Factor tests reveal greater relative support for the null hypothesis. The overall pattern provides little to no support for the theory that physical disgust via taste perception harshens judgments of moral wrongness.