Does Cleanliness Influence Moral Judgments

By David J. Johnson, F. Cheung, M. B. Donnellan. 2014

87 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Schnall, Benton, and Harvey (2008) hypothesized that physical cleanliness reduces the severity of moral judgments. In support of this idea, they found that individuals make less severe judgments when they are primed with the concept of cleanliness (Exp. 1) and when they wash their hands after experiencing disgust (Exp. 2). We conducted direct replications of both studies using materials supplied by the original authors. We did not find evidence that physical cleanliness reduced the severity of moral judgments using samples sizes that provided over .99 power to detect the original effect sizes. Our estimates of the overall effect size were much smaller than estimates from Experiment 1 (original d = −0.60, 95% CI [−1.23, 0.04], N = 40; replication d = −0.01, 95% CI [−0.28, 0.26], N = 208) and Experiment 2 (original d = −0.85, 95% CI [−1.47, −0.22], N = 43; replication d = 0.01, 95% CI [−.34, 0.36], N = 126). These findings suggest that the population effect sizes are probably substantially smaller than the ...

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/aa2ca0448fbf690e506bf9058bb78a7c3ae9516f

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Citations in the corpus

Reflections on the replication corner: In praise of conceptual replications (2015, background): “For example, Johnson, Cheung, and Donnellan (2014) failed to replicate a finding by Schnall, Benton, and Harvey (2008) that washing hands led to more lenient moral judgments.”
Many Labs 2: Investigating Variation in Replicability Across Samples and Settings (2018, background): “There have been a variety of failures to replicate effects that were quite large in the original investigation (e.g., Doyen, Klein, Pichon, & Cleeremans, 2012; Hagger et al., 2016; Hawkins, Fitzgerald, & Nosek, 2015; Johnson, Cheung, & Donnellan, 2014).”