 The affectively potent non-harm based rules Nichols focused on are those that proscribe behaviors likely to evoke disgust. In his first experiment designed to test the theory, Nichols administered his version of the moral/conventional task to participants who had read short vignettes describing prototypical moral transgressions, like one child hitting another, prototypical conventional transgressions, like a child wearing pajamas to school, and vignettes describing normatively proscribed disgusting behavior. In one of these, Bill, a man at a dinner party, spits in his water glass before drinking it. To assess whether participants viewed Bill’s transgression to be authority independent, Nichols’ asked: