Authors
Kevin Vezirian, Sarda Elisa, Pierre-Jean Laine, Laurent Bègue, Hans IJzerman
Publication date
2024/10/18
Publisher
OSF
Description
Do colored backgrounds lead to polarized moral judgments? Zarkadi and Schnall (2013) found in their Study 1 that, indeed, exposing English-speaking participants to a black-and-white (versus other colored) background polarized participants’ judgments in a moral dilemma task. This study supported a moral intuitionist model of moral judgment and lent further support to so-called Conceptual Metaphor Theories (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999), and provides evidence that external factors can influence our moral judgment evaluations. However, as the original study only provided weak evidence for the existence of the effect, but that the used paradigm could be diagnostic to examine whether a black-and-white priming influences moral judgment, we decided to conduct two replications of this effect. A first large study on French-speaking sample (n= 8,602) found evidence for a convincing null effect, thus failing to demonstrate an effect of the background color on a moral dilemma evaluation, but deviations from the original research might have affected the reliability of our findings. To address this concern, and to exclude cross-cultural differences, we ran a direct replication on an English-speaking sample (n= 366). This second study also failed to find an effect of the background color on a moral dilemma evaluation. Overall, this research suggests that it is doubtful that moral judgment formations can be influenced by external visual clues, such as a black-and-white color priming framing a text.