The evaluation of harm and purity transgressions in Africans: A paradigmatic replication of Rottman and Young (2019)

Abstract

Improving the generalizability of psychology findings to a culture requires sampling participants in that culture. Yet psychology studies rarely sample from Africa even though Africa represents 17% of the global population. Although Africans can leverage the credibility-revolution initiatives to increase rigor and global representation, capacity building might speed the spread of these initiatives. In this study, we investigated an African-wide replication study to test whether Rottman and Young’s “mere-trace” hypothesis of moral reasoning (that people are more sensitive to the dosage of harm-based transgressions than purity transgressions) extends to several African communities. We used a training method developed by the Collaborative Replication and Education Project to train 23 African collaborators. During this process, we conducted a paradigmatic replication of Rottman and Young’s test of the mere-trace hypothesis in 12 contributing African sites from Burkina Faso, Kenya, Morocco, Nigeria, and Tanzania that sampled 783 participants after exclusions. Consistent with the original claim using U.S. samples, our African participants judged severe harm transgressions as more wrong than less severe ones but were not as sensitive to severity for purity transgressions (Domain × Dose: b = −4.63; p < .01). Moreover, the effect of dosage was smaller than reported among the U.S. sample, and our African participants rated all transgression scenarios more wrong than the U.S. sample. Resource constraints limited our sample to five African countries and to Africans dwelling in urban communities. Moral psychology should transcend the moral issues prioritized in the original study to include those considered important in African societies.