Pop Science
23rd March 2011
From David Brooks at the NYT.
What sorts of people are good at reading emotion? . . . Taste may play a role, too. For the journal Psychological Science, Kendall Eskine, Natalie Kacinik and Jesse Prinz gave people sweet-tasting, bitter-tasting and neutral-tasting drinks and then asked them to rate a variety of moral transgressions. As expected, people who had tasted the bitter drink were more likely to register moral disgust, suggesting that having Cherry Coke in the jury room may be a smart move for good defense lawyers.
Brooks is a public social scientist writing opinion and perspective columns for the NYT. He frequents peer review journals, ponders their wisdom, then distills that science into public comment. Like above.
Kinda neat, that observation about defense lawyers and Cherry Coke. Except that the research he cites provides absolutely no support for his insight and in fact contradicts it.
If you read the research report from Eskine, Kacinik, and Prinz you’ll discover that their taste manipulation only produced differences among people sipping a bitter drink. There was no difference in ratings of moral disgust for those drinking a neutral- or sweet-tasting drink. One might argue that prosecuting attorneys should require quinine water and vinegar in the jury room – that inference would connect to the key finding in the Eskine et al. study. But given that there was no effect for sweet tastes, any recommendation would be a guess.
So what? A public opinion columnist can’t read the methods and results section and scans the intro and discussion only superficially. Hey, lots of folks make it through grad school doing that. And, not a few build literature reviews the same way for their peer review papers, and yet again, not a few reviewers do the same thing when considering a paper for publication.
Read that Eskine et al. paper. It’s tied in to the Embodiment Effect, wherein the exterior changes the interior or the body changes the mind. People completed an established measurement task that required them to read six scenarios describing different kinds of moral transgressions in daily life. They then rated their “moral disgust” or how bad they believed the scenario to be. Participants were randomly assigned to three different drinks while doing this moral task – a bitter, sweet, or neutral (water) drink. They were given a cover story to divert their attention about the drink.
They were told that we were exploring the effects of motor interference (specifically arm-hand movements) on cognitive processing, and we therefore directed them to drink a beverage during a moral-judgment task to instantiate this movement in a natural way.
Okay. We direct their attention to the motor movement and away from the taste of the drink. Now, of course, everyone will still taste their drink, but will at least have the distraction of that cover story. (It would have been nice to do a debriefing on whether participants thought that taste was important in the study, but if Eskine et al. did this, they didn’t report it.)
Here’s the graph of moral disgust ratings by the three taste groups. A higher score means the reader found the vignette to be more objectionable.
Results revealed a significant effect of beverage type, F(2, 51) = 7.368, p = .002, ηp2 = .224. Planned contrasts showed that participants’ moral judgments in the bitter condition (M = 78.34, SD = 10.83) were significantly harsher than judgments in the control condition (M = 61.58, SD = 16.88), t(51) = 3.117, p = .003, d = 1.09, and in the sweet condition (M = 59.58, SD = 16.70), t(51) = 3.609, p = .001, d = 1.22. Judgments in the control and sweet conditions did not differ significantly, t(51) = 0.405, n.s.
If you are going to comment on the implications of this research, you need to understand this paragraph. Only participants sipping the bitter taste showed different ratings from the other two groups who did not differ. Thus, we see what we can ironically call the Brooks Effect – moving ones eyes over text without comprehension then offering explanations and inferences. It’s a necessary skill for FauxItAlls as when Malcolm Gladwell expertly discussed the arcane mathematics of the Igon which true propellor heads more correctly understand as Eigen, a horse of an entirely different meaning.
Let’s consider this paper like persuasion scientists rather than guys writing for money on a deadline. Is it possible that researchers in the past have looked at this? And, what are the psychological processes at work here?
Realize that this is a conditioning experiment. People are exposed to six stimuli that varying on their moral qualities. Associated with those stimuli are positive, negative, or neutral stimuli (the drinks) that elicit strong reflexive responses. Ding-Dong, right?
Now, let’s get in the Wayback Machine and look at a study from the 1930s. I’m quoting myself from the Primer chapter on Classical Conditioning.
“Professor Greg Razran conducted an interesting study of classical conditioning with political slogans. He gave a small group of 24 adults a list of political slogans contemporary for the times (the late 1930s). Consider:
America for Americans!
Workers of the World Unite!
No Other Ism but Americanism!
Down With War and Fascism!
He had the participants rate the slogans on a 7 point attitude scale. Then over the next several days, he exposed each participant to these slogans under 3 different conditions: 1) while eating a free lunch, 2) while smelling foul odors, and 3) a neutral condition. He made sure that a particular slogan only appeared in one condition and he repeated this pairing of condition with slogan several times. After these exposures to the “persuasive communication” (free lunch, foul smell, or neutral), he then had the participants rerate their attitude toward the slogans.”
The human senses here are smell and taste rather than taste alone and given that Eskine et al. are approaching their problem from with the Embodiment Effect and make no special claims about taste compared to smell and also cite smell studies in their rationale, the Razran study here is relevant. It is in the same ball park, testing the classical conditioning of the reflexive response to smell and taste with symbolic and semantic information (the slogans). What did Razran find?
Not too surprisingly, Razran found that people changed their attitudes towards the slogans depending upon the “persuasive communication” condition. If the slogan was associated with the free lunch, their attitude toward it improved from pre to post test. If the slogan was associated with the foul smells, their attitude became more unfavorable, and finally for slogans associated in the neutral condition, there was no change. Razran also asked each participant to try and recall the condition that each slogan had been paired with in the persuasive testing. They couldn’t do any better than chance guessing.
Notice that Razran made his classical conditioning Embodiment Effect work with both positive and negative conditions, while Eskine et al. could only find the effect with the negative taste. Why? Eskine et al. glide by their failure without comment when prior research has already demonstrated that you can condition the Embodiment Effect in the direction of the foundational S-R relationship. Maybe their sweet drink wasn’t sweet enough? Maybe the bitter drink was too bitter. The Goldilocks problem! But, doesn’t this lack of effect weaken the results of their study and make one wonder? It’s not consistent with well established findings.
Stay with this as we move to a secondary hypothesis from the Eskine et al. study.
In addition, we wanted to test the relation between political views and sensitivity to disgust. The former variable was of interest because politically conservative individuals seem to rely more on sensory information (Haidt & Hersh, 2001) and show greater sensitivity to disgust (Inbar, Pizarro, & Bloom, 2009) than do individuals with liberal views; we wanted to test this claim using our taste manipulation. We hypothesized that if conservatives are indeed more sensitive to disgust, then the taste manipulation should affect their moral processing more strongly than the moral processing of liberals.
Consider this as an interesting extension of Embodiment Effects. If I can move your exterior to change your interior, then maybe I can make that interior change vibrate over to related interiors like political philosophy. Interesting.
Following the moral-judgment task, participants were given an unrelated language distracter task, in which they described their language background and rated sentences for their imageability. Participants were also asked to provide some basic demographic information and indicate their political orientation as either conservative or liberal.
Let’s recap here. We’ve got a true experimental design with participants assigned randomly to one of three conditions. They do some tasks. We analyze those outcomes within each randomly assigned condition. But, with this new independent variable of political preference, we do not have a random assignment. People indicate their political preference after the randomized drinking task.
A 2 (political orientation: conservative, liberal) × 3 (taste: bitter, sweet, control) between-subjects ANOVA was conducted on moral judgments to determine whether political orientation influenced judgments within each taste condition. There was a significant main effect of taste, F(2, 38) = 9.741, p < .001, ηp2 = .339, which reflected the same difference between the bitter condition and the control and sweet conditions that we found in our one-way ANOVA. Simple-effects analyses of political orientation in each taste condition showed that conservatives’ moral judgments were marginally different from liberals’ moral judgments in the control condition (M = 51.81, SD = 15.83, and M = 66.74, SD = 17.49, respectively), F(1, 38) = 3.979, p = .053, ηp 2 = .095. No other comparisons approached significance (see Fig. 2).
Read that paragraph again. They run an ANOVA with two independent variables, taste (manipulated) and political preference (measured). They find a statistically significant main effect for the randomized variable of taste which mirrors the disgust rating. Note they do not report a main effect for politics or an interaction effect for Taste By Politics. Politics has no effect either alone or in interaction. The results disconfirm their original hypothesis about moral disgust and political preference.
Yet.
To further test our hypothesis about whether disgust affects conservatives’ and liberals’ judgments differently, we divided subjects into two groups: the disgust group (bitter condition) and the nondisgust group (sweet and control conditions combined). We then conducted two contrast analyses, one for conservatives and one for liberals, to directly compare judgments between the disgust and nondisgust groups. Conservatives’ judgments were significantly harsher in the disgust group (M = 84.94, SD = 4.69) than in the nondisgust group (sweet condition: M = 56.60, SD = 17.00; control condition: M = 51.81, SD = 15.83), t(16) = 4.473, p < .001, d = 2.21. Conversely, liberals’ judgments did not differ significantly between the disgust group (M = 76.67, SD = 9.47) and the nondisgust group (sweet condition: M = 64.72, SD = 14.07; control condition: M = 66.74, SD = 17.49), t(22) = 1.703, n.s. This suggests that liberals are less likely to recruit extraneous sensoriperceptual information during moral processing than conservatives are. Taken together, these results suggest that physical disgust helps instantiate moral disgust, and that these effects are more salient in individuals with politically conservative views than in individuals with politically liberal views.
(Are you still reading this or have you zoned out with the Brooks Effect?)
What gives here? The test Eskine et al. proposes for their hypothesis about disgust and conservatism fails. No main effect. No interaction effect. So, when the results don’t fit the hypothesis, change the results! By the generally accepted standards of research analysis, the failure of the first 2 X 3 ANOVA (taste, political preference, and interaction) to find a positive result for either the main or interaction effect with political preference means that these results reject the experimental hypothesis and retain the null. Further testing is not warranted because of the dead ANOVA. Yet, the reviewers allow Eskine et al. to move this over there and that over here and dipsy-doodle, abracadabra, conservatives are disgusting!
All together we have a shaky study that cannot replicate well established findings from Classical Conditioning, misapplies the standards of analysis, and concocts patterns of results to fit an expectation which means the paper is pretty much a fairy tale from a persuasion science perspective.
But, it is useful for conservative New York Times columnists!