Abstract
A growing body of evidence suggests that taste is not only an essential physical experience, but also an embodied cue of evaluation. The embodied gustatory experiences may affect ethical evaluation. However, it remains unclear how different forms of taste, such as the word sweet, the sweet food image and the actual sweet taste, are associated with ethical evaluation. Does the visual food taste have a priming effect on the moral-terms evaluation? Does the actual gustatory taste influence the ethical processing similarly to the taste images? All the questions will be answered by the three experiments introduced in this paper. Experiment 1 was to test the implicit association between taste words and ethical words. Experiments 2 and 3 were to test the prime-effect of the food image and the actual gustatory perception on ethical evaluation. The results supported our hypothesis that sweet taste words were strongly associated with moral words and bitter taste words with immoral words. Regarding the priming effect, food images and actual gustatory taste lead to different modifications of ethical evaluation. With food image priming, the bitter taste pictures up-regulated the ethical ratings, i.e., the moral phrases were rated more positive, and the immoral phrases were rated less negative, compared with sweet taste images. On the other hand, with actual taste priming, the sweet stimulation could indeed up-regulate the ethical ratings compared with the bitter stimulation. Such a seemingly conflicting influence of different forms of taste on moral evaluation is further considered.
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All the data and materials are available at the Open Science Framework (OSF): https://osf.io/p7x3j/
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The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial supports from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC 61703058) and the Higher Education Innovation and Development Project provided by the Department of Education of Guangdong Province (Project number: 2016GXJK043).
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Yingli Li and Lihong Liu are co-first-authors, the authors contribute equally to this study
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Li, Y., Liu, L., Li, Z. et al. Different forms of taste can influence ethical evaluation. Curr Psychol 42, 13308–13317 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-022-02710-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-022-02710-1