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Article

Wholesome Foods and Wholesome Morals? Organic Foods Reduce Prosocial Behavior and Harshen Moral Judgments

Kendall J. Eskine 1

Abstract

Recent research has revealed that specific tastes can influence moral processing, with sweet tastes inducing prosocial behavior and disgusting tastes harshening moral judgments. Do similar effects apply to different food types (comfort foods, organic foods, etc.)? Although organic foods are often marketed with moral terms (e.g., Honest Tea, Purity Life, and Smart Balance), no research to date has investigated the extent to which exposure to organic foods influences moral judgments or behavior. After viewing a few organic foods, comfort foods, or control foods, participants who were exposed to organic foods volunteered significantly less time to help a needy stranger, and they judged moral transgressions significantly harsher than those who viewed nonorganic foods. These results suggest that exposure to organic foods may lead people to affirm their moral identities, which attenuates their desire to be altruistic.

Keywords

morality, prosociality, organic food, moral licensing, embodied cognition

Organic foods, which are typically the products of ethical and

environmentally friendly practices, are often marketed with

moral terms (e.g., Honest Tea, Purity Life, Smart Balance,

etc.). Is this just a marketing strategy, a linguistic coincidence,

or do people’s conceptual representations of organic food and

morality actually share the same mental space? Some research

suggests that exposure to different types of tastes and foods can

influence higher order judgments involved with complex

domains like morality and prosocial behavior.

In the domain of taste, Meier, Moeller, Riemer-Peltz, and

Robinson (2012) revealed that people were more willing to

help others after tasting something sweet, whereas Eskine,

Kacinik, and Prinz (2011) showed that disgusting tastes can

lead to harsher moral judgments. In the domain of food, Trisoli

and Gabriel (2011) found that exposure to comfort foods like

chicken soup alleviated feelings of loneliness, and Bastian,

Loughnan, Haslam, and Radke (2012) revealed that the extent

to which meat-eaters attributed moral status to animals

depended largely on whether they were likely to consume those

animals. For example, animals that were perceived as highly

edible (e.g., chicken, cow, and fish) were judged to be signifi-

cantly less capable of possessing various mental capacities

(e.g., morality, pain, pleasure, memory, emotion, etc.) than ani-

mals that were perceived as inedible (e.g., mole, rat, and sloth).

While the above research highlights how our daily interac-

tions with different foods and tastes can influence moral pro-

cessing, no research to date has experimentally investigated

the extent to which exposure to organic foods influences moral

behavior and moral judgments. In order to test whether

exposure to organic food does in fact give rise to the moral

superiority suggested by its marketing, participants were

exposed to one of the three different food types (organic, com-

fort, or control) prior to receiving an opportunity to help a

needy other and making moral judgments.

Two outcomes are likely with respect to organic food.

Drawing from Schnall, Roper, and Fessler’s (2010) research

on feelings of elevation, one possibility is that exposure to

organic foods will make participants feel good about them-

selves and therefore subsequently engage in more altruistic

acts, which would result in greater volunteerism and kinder

moral judgments. On the other hand, the second possibility

would make opposite predictions.

Rozin (1999) argued that moralization takes place when pre-

ferences are transformed into values, a process that often

occurs in health domains (e.g., cigarette smoking, drugs, etc.).

Going beyond mere marketing terms, there are at least two pos-

sible routes that may lead organic food exposure to increase the

salience of one’s moral identity. The first route leads people to

1 Department of Psychological Sciences, Loyola University New Orleans, New

Orleans, LA, USA

Corresponding Author:

Kendall J. Eskine, Department of Psychological Sciences, Loyola University New

Orleans, Box 194, 6363 Saint Charles Avenue, New Orleans, LA 70118, USA.

Email: [email protected]

Social Psychological and Personality Science 4(2) 251-254 ª The Author(s) 2012 Reprints and permission: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1948550612447114 spps.sagepub.com

moralize their preferences for organic foods for reasons of

health, what some might consider ‘‘moral expansion’’ (Rozin,

1997). The second route leads people to moralize their prefer-

ences for organic foods because it is viewed as a morally super-

ior choice for the environment, which is an example of ‘‘moral

piggybacking’’ (Rozin, 1997). While it is also possible that

some people could take both routes, the resulting moralization

processes should similarly cause individuals’ moral identities

to become more salient when being exposed to organic foods.

Based on the research from moral licensing, which indicates

that people are less likely to act altruistically when their moral identities are salient (Sachdeva, Iliev, & Medin, 2009), the

present research predicts that those exposed to organic foods

would help less and make harsher moral judgments compared

to those exposed to nonorganic foods.

Method

Sixty-two Loyola University undergraduates (37 females and 25

males) participated in the present experiment for course credit and

were randomly assigned to one of the three food conditions

(organic, comfort, and control) in a between-subjects design. Told

that they were participating in two unrelated studies (a consumer

research survey about food desirability and a separate moral judg-

ment task), participants were first given a packet containing four

counterbalanced pictures of food items from one of the following

categories: organic foods with organic food labels (apple, spi-

nach, tomato, and carrot), comfort foods (ice cream, cookie, cho-

colate, and brownie), or control foods (oatmeal, rice, mustard, and

beans) (see Figure 1). Participants also rated each food item on a

7-point scale (1 ¼ not at all desirable to 7 ¼ very desirable) to help corroborate the cover story as well as provide information

about their personal food preferences. All food items were chosen

based on survey results from a separate sample of participants (N

¼ 28, 16 females) during which they rated a variety of foods on a 7-point scale (1 ¼ typical comfort food, 4 ¼ neither comfort nor organic food, 7 ¼ typical organic food), giving the following

results for organic foods (M ¼ 6.61, SD ¼ 1.17), comfort foods (M ¼ 1.54, SD¼ .98), and neither comfort nor organic and hence ‘‘control’’ foods (M ¼ 4.32, SD ¼ 1.37).

Participants next received a packet containing six counter-

balanced moral transgressions describing second cousins enga-

ging in consensual incest, a man eating his already-dead dog, a

congressman accepting bribes, a lawyer prowling hospitals

for victims, a person shoplifting, and a student stealing library

books (Wheatley & Haidt, 2005). Each moral judgment was

indicated on a 7-point scale (1 ¼ not at all morally wrong to 7 ¼ very morally wrong). As with previous research (Eskine, Kacinik, & Prinz, 2011), all judgments were aver-

aged into a single score.

After next answering demographic questions, participants

were told ‘‘that another professor from another department is

also conducting research and really needs volunteers.’’ They

were informed that they would not receive course credit or

compensation for their help and were asked to indicate how

many minutes (of the 30) they would be willing to volunteer

(a commonly used measure of prosocial behavior, Meier et

al., 2012). All participants were debriefed and probed for sus-

picion, although no participants indicated any awareness of the

experiment’s purpose.

Results

A between-subjects analysis of variance (ANOVA) revealed an

overall effect of food type on prosocial behavior, F(2, 59) ¼ 8.894, p < .001, Zp

2 ¼ .232, and a follow-up Tukey’s honestly significant difference (HSD) test showed that those exposed to

organic food volunteered significantly less time (n ¼ 20, M ¼ 13.40, SD ¼ 9.38.) than those exposed to control foods (n ¼ 20, M ¼ 19.88, SD ¼ 10.33), p < .05, or comfort foods (n ¼ 22, M ¼ 24.55, SD ¼ 5.49), p < .001, with the latter two groups not significantly differing (see Table 1). To demonstrate that these

effects were driven by organic food exposure and not the sub-

jective desirability of each food item, each participant’s four

Apple Ice Cream Mustard

Figure 1. Example food item pictures from the organic, comfort, and control conditions, respectively.

252 Social Psychological and Personality Science 4(2)

food desirability ratings were averaged into an overall desir-

ability score, which was then treated as a covariate. The result

of this analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) was still significant,

F(2, 58) ¼ 8.042, p ¼ .001, Zp2 ¼ .217, thus ruling out the effects of subjective food desirability.

A separate ANOVA on averaged moral judgments indicated

an overall effect of food type, F(2, 59) ¼ 7.516, p ¼ .001, Zp

2 ¼ .203, and a follow-up Tukey’s HSD test showed that those exposed to organic food made significantly harsher

moral judgments (M ¼ 5.58, SD ¼ .59) than those exposed to control foods (M ¼ 5.08, SD ¼ .62), p < .05, or comfort foods (M ¼ 4.89, SD ¼ .57), p ¼ .001, with the latter two groups not significantly differing (see Table 1). An ANCOVA

was conducted with desirability as a covariate and still

revealed a significant effect of food type, F(2, 58) ¼ 7.210, p ¼ .002, Zp2 ¼ .199, indicating that food desirability did not play a significant role in moral judgment.

Discussion

Together, these findings reveal that organic foods and morality

do share the same conceptual space. As predicted, the findings

showed that exposure to ethical and environmentally friendly

foods resulted in reduced prosocial behavior and harsher

moral judgments. Importantly, the results also indicated that

participants’ food preferences did not influence their prosoci-

ality or moral judgments, thus ruling out subjective desirabil-

ity in the present research. Therefore, the present research

suggests that exposure to organic foods helps people affirm

their moral identities and attenuates their desire to be altruis-

tic, as found by Sachdeva, Iliev, and Medin (2009). In a sim-

ilar vein, Mazar and Zhong (2010) provide evidence for such a

view. In particular, they found that participants were more

likely to cheat and steal after purchasing ‘‘green’’ rather than

conventional products. Since green and organic products

share many commonalities, it seems likely that environmen-

tally friendly products can actually affect the salience of one’s

moral identity and induce moral licensing.

Drawing from Rozin (1997, 1999), two mechanisms were

described to explain how exposure to organic foods might

affirm individuals’ moral identities. According to the moral

expansion route, some might moralize their preferences for

organic foods for health reasons, whereas the moral piggyback-

ing route asserts that others might moralize organic food

because it is perceived as a morally superior choice for the

environment, other organisms, and so on. While it is possible

that one could simultaneously endorse both routes, they each

have different theoretical implications. The moral expansion

route proposes that moralization is carried by cognitive-

rational processes, whereas the moral piggybacking route is

carried by affective processes (Rozin, 1999). Accordingly,

these routes might lead us to make different predictions about

the extent to which exposure to organic food affirms individu-

als’ moral identities and enables moral licensing.

Classic findings in persuasion and attitude formation may

shed light on this issue (Petty & Cacioppo, 1984). It is well

documented that long-lasting attitude change is a product of

cognitive-rational processes (central route) rather than affec-

tive processes (peripheral route). Given that both the moraliza-

tion and the persuasion approaches position cognitive and

affective information in distinct channels, similar patterns

might occur in moralization processes. For example, while

both routes can lead to moralization of organic food in gen-

eral, those who moralize in cognitive formats might be more

likely to experience moral licensing than those who moralize

in affective formats because, for them, organic food repre-

sents a deliberate choice (rather than a mere emotional asso-

ciation) in a domain that is meaningful to them, which

further strengthens the salience of their moral identities after

exposure to organic food. Although the present research did

not assess participants’ cognitive and affective attitudes

toward organic food, this raises important empirical questions

and warrants further investigation.

What does this mean for organic marketing? Should

advertisers be cautious of how hard they ‘‘push’’ the branding

of their products? One possibility is that those who simply

purchase organic products will be less likely to engage in

other meaningful acts of environmental protection. Although

organic products are indubitably environmentally sound and

ethical choices, perhaps milder, more subtle advertisements

could help promote the beneficial qualities of these products

without inadvertently inducing moral licensing in its

consumers.

Further, given the general nutritional differences and bodily

effects of prototypical comfort and organic foods, future

research should also explore whether actually consuming

organic or comfort food differentially influences moral beha-

viors. While the results from the comfort food condition did not

significantly differ from the control condition, the trends sug-

gest that comfort food exposure can induce more prosocial

behavior and kinder moral judgments, which is compatible

with previous descriptions of comfort food as a ‘‘social surro-

gate’’ (Trisoli & Gabriel, 2011). According to this view, com-

fort foods help connect people in a way that fosters

Table 1. Participants’ Prosocial Behavior (in Minutes) and Moral Judgments as a Function of Food Type.

Condition Organic Food Control Food Comfort Food

Prosocial behavior 13.40 (9.38) 19.88 (10.33) 24.55 (5.49) Moral judgment 5.58 (0.59) 5.08 (0.62) 4.89 (0.57)

Mean ratings of prosocial behavior and moral judgments in each condition with standard deviations in parentheses. Higher values in the prosocial and moral judg- ment variables indicate minutes willing to help and harsher moral judgments, respectively.

Eskine 253

interpersonal warmth. Therefore, differentiating the effects of

organic and comfort food exposure and consumption remains

an important avenue for future research.

More generally, these results are important because food is a

fundamental part of everyone’s life, and as food choices continue

to expand we should explore its psychological consequences.

People celebrate with food, plan their days around it, and even

organize romantic encounters along various confectionary

delights. Even beyond first dates and lunch breaks, food can also

connect people to their heritage. Recipes can convey information

about a family’s history, its geography, and its relationship to the

environment. Despite its ubiquity in daily life, food has been

vastly underexplored in the psychological sciences, although

important strides have been made recently (Zhong & DeVoe,

2010). For example, Schuldt, Muller, and Schwarz (in press)

found that participants judged chocolate to contain fewer calories

when it was described as fair trade (Study 1) or as treating its

workers ethically (Study 2) when compared to chocolates with

no such descriptions. Taken together, this research has consider-

able implications for understanding how our foods choices and

experiences shape more than just our nutrition.

As Paul Rozin (1996, p. 18) noted, ‘‘Food progresses from

being a source of nutrition and sensory pleasure to being a

social marker, an aesthetic experience, a source of meaning and

metaphor, and, often, a moral entity.’’ Indeed, future research

should investigate food and its corresponding embodied states,

which might serve as an important primary metaphor (Lakoff

& Johnson, 1999) that affects the representation, processing,

and development of our moral conceptual architecture.

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Nick Dondzila, David Garcia, Samantha Montano,

and Erica Wright for their help with data collection. The author is

especially grateful to Brian Meier, Paula Niedenthal, and two anon-

ymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments on an earlier version

of this draft.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to

the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, author-

ship, and/or publication of this article.

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Author Biography

Kendall J. Eskine is an assistant professor at the Loyola University

New Orleans, who studies embodied cognition, food psychology, and

the representation and processing of abstract concepts.

254 Social Psychological and Personality Science 4(2)