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

Landy and Goodwin’s (2015) meta-analysis found support for most of the experimental findings we reported in Schnall, Haidt, Clore, and Jordan (2008), including a robust amplification effect of olfactory disgust on moral judgment even in the absence of important moderator variables. Had they considered those known moderators and attended to known attributional issues, they might have confirmed all of our findings. With failed replications on various topics getting published these days, we were pleased that Landy and Goodwin’s (2015) 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 hypothesis of Haidt’s (2001) social intuitionist model of moral judgment, namely that “disgust amplifies moral evaluations—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 without requiring moderators. And like us, they found that the effects of incidental disgust are as strong for non-purity violations (such as falsifying a resume) as for purity violations (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 3 experiments that did not involve smell, the amplification effect of incidental physical disgust 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) and mindfulness (Sato & Sugiura, 2014). Their failure to find an overall effect in non-olfactory studies replicates the pattern we reported. Their reasoning that the relevant analyses were “not feasible” since only some experiments had included these moderators raises the fundamental question of why a meta-analysis was conducted on data for which essential variables had not even been assessed. Second, Landy and Goodwin (2015) minimized the importance of one of their own major findings – that for studies that used taste or smell to induce disgust, there was a clear and robust effect even without considering moderator 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 elicited by a moral infraction, their confirmation that bad tastes and smells can amplify moral condemnation of unrelated actions is very clear evidence of the mechanism 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 & Clore, 1983; Schwarz, 2012). Third, experiments investigating the influence of emotional states on judgment require that participants do not correctly attribute the induced feeling to its true source (e.g., Lapate, Rokers, Li, & Davidson, 2014; Schwarz & Clore, 1983; Schnall, Abrahamson, & Laird, 2002; for a review, see Schwarz, 2012). If one experiences disgust while considering a morally questionable action, the action is likely to seem disgusting and immoral (at least, for people who are