Does Networking Make People Feel “Dirty”? Reconsidering the Evidence in Casciaro, Gino, Kouchaki, 2014

In 2014, Casciaro, Gino, and Kouchaki published an influential paper (hereafter referred to as CGK) for our understanding of networking behaviors. Specifically, the paper offered experimental evidence that people view networking actions as morally impure, which leads them to feel physically dirty when networking, which ultimately heightens the mental accessibility of cleansing-related concepts. In the present paper, I challenge the theoretical premise and the empirical evidence presented in CGK. To that end, I present a well-powered pre-registered experiment aimed at 1) replicating CGK’s main effect, 2) replicating the psychological mechanism that underpins CGK’s finding (i.e., the Macbeth Effect), and 3) establishing a “maximum positive control” (Hilgard, 2021) for any effect of networking on people’s desire for cleansing. This experiment reveals a null result on the effect documented by CGK (d = .02), a null result on the Macbeth effect (d = .02), and a maximum positive control effect that is much smaller than the original finding reported in CGK (d = .51 vs. d = .98). I finally discuss other incidental issues in CGK, and conclude that there is no evidence that people experience physical dirtiness when networking.