Perceived morality of direct versus indirect harm: Replications of the preference for indirect harm effect

Abstract

Royzman and Baron (2002) demonstrated that people prefer indirect harm to direct harm: they judge actions that produce harm as a by-product to be more moral than actions that produce harm directly. In two preregistered studies, we successfully replicated Study 2 of Royzman and Baron (2002) with a Hong Kong student sample (N = 46) and an online American Mechanical Turk sample (N = 314). We found consistent evidential support for the preference for indirect harm phenomenon (d = 0.46 [0.26, 0.65] to 0.47 [0.18, 0.75]), weaker than effects reported in the original findings of the target article (d = 0.70 [0.40, 0.99]). We also successfully replicated findings regarding reasons underlying a preference for indirect harm (directness, intent, omission, probability of harm, and appearance of harm). All materials, data, and code are available on: https://osf.io/ewq8g/

Misprediction of affective outcomes due to different evaluation modes: Replication and extension of two distinction bias experiments by Hsee and Zhang (2004)

“…Second, whereas the original studies were presumably conducted in the lab, the replication studies were conducted online via the Qualtrics survey software. Research shows high levels of consistency between original lab-based samples and more recent online samples, with little variability in results being attributable to whether studies are conducted in lab versus online (e.g., Klein et al, 2018;Ziano et al, 2019). Third, the original Study 2 involved participants reading words, but, because the replication studies were conducted online, the replication involved also copying and pasting the words (we made this adjustment in an attempt to ensure the words were being attended to).…”