People respond to GM food with disgust more than fear: Comment on Royzman, Cusimano and Leeman (2017)

Abstract

Scott, Inbar and Rozin (2016) reported an association between greater disgust sensitivity (DS) and more negative attitudes towards genetically modified (GM) food. Royzman, Cusimano and Leeman (2017) replicated this association but argued that fear, not disgust, is the primary emotion associated with negative GM food attitudes. We believe that this conclusion is premature, because the “high-granularity” disgust scale variants on which it is based are theoretically and statistically questionable. We explain the issues with these disgust scale variants and report direct evidence showing that people respond to GM food with disgust more than fear.