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

With failed replications on various topics getting published these days, we were pleased that Landy and Goodwin's (2015, this issue) 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 evalua-tions—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 nonpurity 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 three 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 Their failure to find an overall effect in nonolfactory studies replicates the pattern we reported. Their reasoning that the relevant analyses were " not feasible " because 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 using taste or smell to induce disgust, there was a clear and robust effect even without considering modera-tor variables. …