"That's bitter!": Culture-specific effects of gustatory experience on judgments of fairness and advancement.

Abstract

[Retraction notice: A retraction for this article was reported in Vol 150(6) of Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (see record 2021-94347-001). The following article is being retracted: Xu, J., Wan, F., & Schwarz, N. (2020, October 29). "That's bitter!": Culture-specific effects of gustatory experience on judgments of fairness and advancement. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. Advance online publication. http://dx.doi.org/10 .1037/xge0000985 A user of the open science data sets accompanying the article noticed confounds between culture condition or treatment condition and sex of participants in studies 3, 4, and 5. What caused these confounds could not be fully reconstructed. The first and second authors, who handled data collection, assume that the confounds resulted from a confluence of two decisions. First, students were recruited through campus advertisements and encouraged to bring friends, which resulted in the arrival of mostly same-sex groups. Second, in deviation from standard protocol, the administration of the taste tests was simplified in these studies by administering the same treatment to all participants who arrived together. Hence, the authors asked for a retraction.....] In English, unfair treatment and social injustice are often described as "bitter" experiences, whereas "eating bitterness" refers to endurance in the face of hardship in Chinese. This suggests that bitter taste may ground experiences of adversity in both cultures, but in culture-specific forms. We tested this possibility by assessing Canadian and Chinese participants' responses to fairness and achievement scenarios after incidental exposure to bitter or neutral tastes. Tasting something bitter increased self-reported motivation and intention to invest effort for Chinese participants, but not Anglo-Canadian participants (Studies 1, 4, 5). Tasting something bitter decreased perceived fairness for Anglo-Canadian participants (Studies 1-3) but not Chinese participants living in China (Study 2). The fairness judgments of Chinese participants living in Canada shed light on adaptation to the host culture: Bitter taste decreased these participants' fairness judgments after living in Canada for 4 years or more (Study 4), provided they were tested in English (Studies 3-4), but exerted no influence when they were tested in Chinese (Study 4). The observed cultural differences are compatible with a relatively higher emphasis on self-improvement in China versus self-enhancement in Canada. Supporting this conjecture, the fairness judgments of Chinese students in Canada followed the Anglo-Canadian pattern when primed with a self-enhancement motive and the effort judgments of Anglo-Canadian students followed the Chinese pattern when primed with a self-improvement motive (Study 5). This suggest that a universal aversive experience (bitter taste) grounds thought about adversity in ways compatible with cultural orientations and reflected in culture-specific metaphors. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).