Does cleanliness influence moral judgments? Response effort moderates the effect of cleanliness priming on moral judgments.

ABSTRACT: Whether cleanliness influences moral judgments has recently become a topic of debate in the psychological literature. After the initial report that activating the notion of physical purity can result in less severe moral judgments (Schnall et al., 2008a), a direct replication (Johnson et al., 2014a) with much larger sample sizes failed to yield similar findings. The current paper examines the possibility that only non-conscious activation of the cleanliness concept, as achieved in participants with low response effort on priming materials, can produce the expected effect. An online replication (Study 1, N = 214) provided evidence that, when participants exerted low (yet still acceptable) levels of response effort to the experimental material, cleanliness priming led to more lenient moral j

SUBMITTER: Huang JL 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4222330 | biostudies-literature | 2014

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature