5.2 A new dataset: Fitouchi and Nettle (2025)
5.2.1 Background to the study
The study whose data we will be using in this chapter (Fitouchi & Nettle, 2025) addresses the question of why people often think certain activities are morally wrong, even though they do no harm to anyone else. Such activities include bodily pleasures such as being lazy, drinking alcohol, eating a lot for pleasure, or having a lot of sex. Moral disapproval is generally directed towards activities that represent being a bad cooperator (cheating, stealing, betraying and so on). The study hypothesis is that people think that activities like lazing, drinking alcohol, eating gluttonously, or taking a lot of sexual pleasure, make the individuals who do them become worse cooperators, because they lose their self-control. Thus, these behaviours are morally disapproved, because although they don’t directly cause harm to anyone else, they are perceived to have a negative effect on cooperative character, and hence the possibility of leading indirectly to harm. (This does not mean this perception is correct, by the way; there is no evidence that eating a lot makes you a bad cooperator. The hypothesis just requires that enough people think that it does.)
The study we will be looking at is study 1 of the paper. In this study, around 400 participants read a vignette about a character called Max, who had either recently increased his laziness and gluttony (the indulgence condition) or decreased it (the restraint condition). Thus, this is an experimental study with one IV (Condition) manipulated between subjects. The key DV is a rating of the likely change in Max’s cooperativeness, named coop_score in the data. This is made up of averaging together four individual questions about the effects of the lifestyle change on Max’s propensity to cooperate into one score. There are other DVs and moderators too but we are not going to worry about those here. There is also a key covariate: puritanism_score. This is a scale measuring the participant’s puritan attitudes. You would expect people high in puritanism score to feel that indulgence would be particularly corrosive to Max’s cooperative character.
You can find the pre-registration of the study (study 1 remember) on the OSF repository for the project (https://osf.io/52thu/). Reading this and/or the preprint will help you follow along.
5.2.2 Getting the data
The raw data and R scripts are all available in the repository at https://osf.io/52thu/. You are looking for ‘Files > Data > study1_processed.csv’. Use the three dots to the right of the file name to save it locally into your working directory. (‘Session > Set working directory’ to change your working directory remember.). Then to load the data:
I have called the dataframe df7 for consistency with the analysis script of the study. It should have appeared in your ‘Environment’ window. Now look at the column names, and find our IV Condition, DV coop_score, and covariate puritanism_score.