Ithaca College

Leigh Ann Vaughn and an international team of researchers from over 20 institutions have published "A creative destruction approach to replication: Implicit work and sex morality across cultures" in Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022103120304005

The major finding was that work is intuitively considered to be moral across cultures, and this does not depend on whether participants are in regions of the U.S. where the Protestant Work Ethic traditionally was strong. An independent group of over 200 researchers at many institutions (the Culture & Work Morality Forecasting Collaboration) predicted that this finding was likely occur.

Other highlights:

• This “creative destruction” replication initiative added new measures and populations to four original study designs.
• The theory of Implicit Puritanism was competed against seven alternative accounts of work morality.
• A number of original findings replicated across multiple cultures, whereas two were identified as likely false positives.
• The best-fitting model suggests work is intuitively moralized across cultures.

Professor Vaughn headed the Ithaca College part of the project. She and her Social and Personality Research Team students collected data from 100 participants in a laboratory and coded responses. Professor Vaughn also contributed to the writing of the paper.