Prescription for Love: An Experimental Investigation of Laypeople’s Relative Moral Disapproval of Love Drugs

Abstract

New technologies regularly bring about profound changes in our daily lives. Romantic relationships are no exception to these transformations. Some philosophers expect the emergence in the near future of love drugs: a theoretically achievable biotechnological intervention that could be designed to strengthen and maintain love in romantic relationships. We investigated laypeople’s resistance to the use of such technologies and its sources. Across two studies (Study 1, French and Peruvian university students, N after exclusion = 186; Study 2, Amazon Mechanical Turk sample, N after exclusion = 693, pre-registered), we found that the use of love drugs designed to strengthen and maintain love in romantic relationships are considered as more morally problematic than psychological therapy with the same aim. In Study 2, we show that this last effect is partially due to the fact that the love resulting from the use of love drugs is perceived as less authentic, intense, and durable. We discuss the specific role of authenticity in the relative moral disapproval of love drugs.

Keywords:

• bioethics
• love
• love drugs
• morality
• moral judgment

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We thank Cathy Rubiños and Eriann Blondel for their assistance.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT

The data used in the research are available. The data can be obtained at: https://osf.io/3an4q/

Notes

1 This unexpected large sample size was due to an unanticipated and unusual situation presumably corresponding to an uncontrolled flow of multiple people signing up at the same time on MTurk.

2 In response to an anonymous reviewer’s concerns about the exclusion of participants based on attention check, we have performed our statistical analyses again, keeping these participants. The conclusions remain unchanged.

3 The indirect effect through authenticity was significantly stronger that the indirect effect through duration (95% CI [−0.23, −0.05]) and intensity (−0.23, −0.06). The latter two were not statistically significantly different from each other (−0.07, 0.05).

4 We had originally planned to run separate tests for these different covariates and to check that they did not interact, but given the number of tests involved, we preferred to make it simpler and deviate from the pre-registration by running a single test containing all the potential covariates in one go. It should also be noted that, for theoretical reasons and to be consistent with our pre-registration, we still wish to retain the original type of statistical analyses (i.e., multiple mediation) rather than use other statistical analyses such as MANCOVA.

5 We are justified in making this comparison because the corresponding Welch’s F-test was significant (for more details, see Table 3).

6 We used a multiple mediation model based on the claim that our mediators explained how and why (Kraemer et al. 2008) love pills would be perceived as relatively less morally acceptable than other means to strengthen and maintain love in romantic relationships. Our model also fits both Baron and Kenny’s (1986) and MacArthur’s (Kraemer et al. 2008) approaches on the eligibility criteria defining whether any variable functions as a mediator or moderator. This includes the temporal precedence (the experimental manipulation of the type of treatment precedes the mediators) as well as association (between the type of treatment and the mediators). Given the disagreement between the two approaches on the necessity (or not) to include the interaction between the independent variable and the mediator in the model for mediation, we did not consider the analytical criteria (Kraemer et al. 2008).

Additional information

Funding

Florian Cova’s work on this research project was supported by an Eccellenza Grant of the Swiss National Science Foundation (“Eudaimonic emotions and the (meta-)philosophy of well-being”).