by Thalma Lobel
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If physical disgust influences us to make harsher moral judgments, is it possible that physical cleaning influences us to judge moral issues less harshly? Two different studies examined this question and came up with seemingly contradictory results. In one study a group of British researchers10 presented students with four scrambled sentences, which they were to form into meaningful sentences. For one group, half of the sentences had words that were related to purity or cleanliness, such as clean, washed, and pure. The other group received only neutral sentences without any cleaning-related words. The participants were then asked to judge several moral dilemmas. Those who read cleaning-related words were less harsh in their moral judgments than those who read neutral words. Just reading words like wash, clean, and pure in sentences activated concepts of cleanliness and consequently made participants think less harshly about others’ immoral behavior.
In the other study,11 the researchers manipulated cleaning not by letting their participants read cleaning-related words but by asking participants in one group to cleanse their hands with an antiseptic wipe before they touched the computer, and comparing their judgments with those by a group who did not clean their hands.
In contrast to the previous study, researchers found that those who washed their hands judged various social dilemmas as more morally wrong than did those who did not wash their hands.
But these seemingly contradictory results might not be so different. In the first study the participants were thinking about clean words and may have attributed this cleaning concept to the moral issues, consequently judging them less harshly. In the second study the participants cleaned themselves and felt pure and clean, consequently judging other moral issues more harshly. The link between physical cleaning and morality is complex, but seemingly irrelevant things, such as experiencing a bad smell or taste, having clean hands, or reading clean words, can influence how wrong certain transgressions seem to us.
This is quite a disturbing finding. We would like to believe that our moral judgments are determined by our bedrock values and that we decide that an act is morally wrong according to those values, not by the smell of the room or whether the room is clean or messy.
How Does It Work?
This link between physical cleaning and morality may be explained from both an evolutionary and a metaphorical perspective. As mentioned in the previous section, physical disgust probably developed to protect us from germs, parasites, and other carriers of disease. The disgust reaction is aversion, which makes us avoid the causes of our disgust. Emotions of moral disgust developed later, out of the physical disgust we experience, and often are described using the language of disgust.
This link can also be explained by scaffolding, the association between concrete concepts and abstract concepts. Metaphors link the abstract and concrete domains, and abstract concepts are grounded in the concrete concepts that we experience through our senses. Our notion of morality is grounded in the experience of physical disgust and cleanliness that we learn early in life.
I was driving with a friend of mine and three children: my three-year-old granddaughter, Natalie; and my friend’s two grandchildren, a four-and-a-half-year-old boy and an eight-year-old girl. The two older children were talking about a game they like, and Natalie was trying valiantly to get a word in edgewise. When she finally got her chance, she said: “You know what is yucky? Poop!” The four-and-a-half-year-old boy sitting next to her retorted: “You know what is also yucky? A rotten banana!”
It is easy for a grandmother to be entertained by her granddaughter, but what occupied three-year-old Natalie’s mind to prompt her to say that she was disgusted by “poop”? Perhaps she was also disgusted by being excluded. Once on the playground I heard a five-year-old boy call another boy he was angry at “poop.” Like warmth and affection, disgust seems to be built into our psyches.
The emotions of moral disgust are scaffolded onto the reactions and emotions of physical disgust. As we grow, our understanding and context of moral disgust is based in the same physical reaction of disgust we have known all our lives. Evolution has created a shortcut to help us understand and feel complex moral concepts. That’s why it’s natural for us to call an immoral person “rotten to the core” or a “filthy liar.”
The Moral of the Story
We have the desire to clean ourselves after unethical deeds, so be aware if you notice more frequent and longer washing habits in your children or partners. They may be just the first indication that you ought to look more carefully at possible reasons and connections. Guilt is a very personal experience. For many, guilt is reconciliation, a necessary process that we feel obliged to experience when we’ve done something wrong or less than ethical. But if you are having a hard time letting go of guilt, a conscious act of washing yourself can help you release some of those feelings and move on.
Another important implication of these studies relates to our habits and decisions as consumers. If indeed we associate cleanliness with morality, then it follows that we probably perceive a cleaner environment as more ethical. That it is more pleasant to be in a clean environment than in a dirty one is news to no one. Most people would agree that it is more pleasant to do business in a clean and tidy room than in a messy one. This notion is as true for a computer store as it is for a doctor’s clinic. The studies just discussed, however, go a step further, suggesting that without our awareness, we perceive a company and its representatives as more ethical, reliable, and honest in a clean environment than in a less clean one.
Quite often we find ourselves in situations where we have to decide whether to buy a certain product, or to choose between several professionals, such as doctors, dentists, or repair persons. Sometimes we face these decisions armed with recommendations from our friends, but often we don’t have a clue.
I think we can all agree that sometimes what salespeople tell you is true, sometimes it’s an exaggeration, and sometimes it’s an outright lie. One of the most important factors in the sale is how reliable and honest the company or the salesperson seems. If the environment (e.g., shop, office, clinic) is clean and has a tidy aesthetic; if the salespeople radiate cleanliness, smell nice, and are dressed in clean, fresh-looking clothes; if the location is clean and smells fresh, there is a better chance that we will believe what we are told. It’s easy to be suspicious if the store or clinic is filthy, messy, and ill-kempt. While we cannot control our unconscious inclinations, being aware of our susceptibility to these environmental factors could help us to exercise caution the next time we are being given a hard sell. A neat salesperson is not necessarily honest, and a frumpy, disheveled one need not necessarily be regarded with suspicion. Moreover, a cleaner salesperson may be more likely to cheat, and a dirty homeless person could be the most honest person you meet.
Cleanliness isn’t a magic trick that can wash away guilt or make a sale. It is, however, another inch in a game of inches, and another facet of the mind to understand and be aware of. Most of us do associate morality and cleanliness. Our moral judgments and behavior, which we may hold as absolute, are nonetheless affected by these unconscious connections. Washing hands is about more than just preparing for dinner; expressions such as dirty hands, dirty mouth, and clean conscience are not just figures of speech. These findings are both interesting and important to our understanding of how the mind works and how close our sensory and bodily sensations are to our emotions, behaviors, and judgments.
Water Under the Bridge
My parents, probably my greatest teachers, used to tell me an old story about a very poor man who lived in a small house with his wife and six children. The family was in dire financial straits and found it taxing to live all together in one small room. Near his breaking point, the man went to seek the advice of his rabbi. After listening to the man tell of the difficulties of living in such a small space, the rabbi asked the man if he kept animals in the yard. The man said he had a cow, a goat, and chickens. The rabbi’s advice was to mo
ve the animals into the house. The man, surprised as he was, did as the rabbi told him to do. A few days later, the man came back to the rabbi, reporting that his family’s situation had worsened. The rabbi’s advice was to remove the chickens. Another few days went by, and the man returned once more, complaining about the mess that the cow and the goat were making. The rabbi’s advice? Take the cow out, and then a few days later do the same with the goat. The man came to the rabbi and thanked him profusely, telling him that life was much easier now.
This story has many morals, but the one I want to emphasize is that the past influences how we see the present, and everything is relative. The present looked much better when the recent past was bad, when the tiny house was filled with not only six children but also chickens, a cow, and a goat. Having reverted to the original circumstances, which had seemed unbearable only a few weeks earlier, the man perceived his situation as good.
Can washing or cleaning—as in “wiping the slate clean”—wash away the influence of past events, behaviors, or emotions? The past influences our present.
The idea that water washes away the past is deeply rooted in the human psyche. One need only look to the prevalence of flood narratives in ancient civilizations. There is, of course, the well-known Old Testament story of Noah and the Ark, in which God, having learned of the evils of human civilization, instructs Noah to build an ark large enough to save only his immediate family and a pair of every species of animal before God floods the Earth until it is cleansed. Earlier stories offer similar narratives of a divinely ordained “great flood” and a heroic man instructed by a deity to build a great vessel in order to survive the deluge. In the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh, Utnapishtim recounts to Gilgamesh how the god Ea warned him of an impending flood. In the Satapatha Brahmana, a Hindu text, Manu is warned by the god Vishnu (in the form of a fish) to build a boat and prepare for a devastating flood. A common thread uniting these narratives is the notion that wicked human behavior prompted a divine entity to wash away all traces of civilization and wipe the slate clean.
To examine whether water can wash away psychological pain from the past, Norbert Schwarz and his colleagues conducted several experiments.Their first study used cognitive dissonance, which is the discomfort we experience when we hold conflicting beliefs, values, or ideas, to explore how our respective “slates” are cleaned.12
A little background on cognitive dissonance. We are constantly faced with choices. We decide what to buy, where to go, whom to date or marry, where to live, which doctor to visit, where we or our kids will attend school, what table we want in our dining room. It is often difficult to choose between two alternatives, but life demands that we make a decision, and thus we do. Nevertheless, the second alternative—the one we did not choose—might still be attractive, lingering in the back of the mind. These conflicting thoughts cause cognitive dissonance.
Theoretically, we loss-averse humans could agonize over our decisions forever, but this would only lead to discomfort—and our minds have evolved to avoid that outcome. Once we make a decision, typically we will strongly justify our choice and decide, for instance, that the car we purchased is much more attractive, well suited to us, and generally better than the other car we considered, when in reality both had advantages and disadvantages.
Our past decisions influence the way we perceive choices. Once we’ve made a decision, in order to reduce the cognitive dissonance, our brains favor the chosen alternative compared with the rejected one.
Back to the “clean slate” experiment. To test whether physical washing would eliminate this lingering influence of previous decisions, the researchers presented students with thirty music CDs and asked them to select ten that they liked, ranking them in order of preference, with the number 1 being the best liked. As a thank-you gift, they were then offered one CD and asked to decide between their fifth and sixth choices.
After the students made their choices, the researchers asked them to participate in another, ostensibly different marketing study, in which they were to evaluate a liquid soap. Half of the students were asked to examine the bottle of the soap, while the other half were asked to actually wash their hands with the soap.
At the third stage of the study, the researchers asked the students to rank again the same ten CDs they had ranked in the first part of the study. For those who did not wash their hands, the perceived difference between the chosen and the unchosen CD increased. They behaved as expected, and acted in accordance with a belief that could be expressed as: “You know what, this CD is pretty good, I was right to choose it, I’m gonna rank it higher this time.” A CD, once chosen, rose in value because of that choice. However, those who washed their hands after making their choice did not change their preference, and the difference between the ranking of the CD they chose and the one not chosen did not increase. They did not feel the need to justify their choices by preferring the chosen CD more than the one not chosen. The simple act of washing seemed to wipe away the influence of the previous decision.
The researchers conducted a comparable study to see whether the results could be replicated. They presented participants with photos of four different fruit jams and asked them to evaluate each jam as part of a consumer survey. They then asked them to choose one of two jams as a thank-you gift. Then the researchers asked the participants to evaluate an antiseptic wipe. In that regard this study was similar to the first study: half of the participants just examined the wipe, whereas the other half cleaned their hands with it. Finally they were asked to rate the expected tastes of the four jams. As in the previous study, the effect of cognitive dissonance was clearly found in those who did not clean their hands. They expected the chosen jam to taste much better than the jam they did not choose and needed to justify their choice. This effect was not observed in those participants who had cleaned their hands. The researchers called this the clean-slate effect. These results suggest that even a cursory cleaning minimizes the influence of past decisions.
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This finding raises the possibility that cleaning may decrease or even eliminate the influence of not only cognitive dissonance but also other past events. Norbert Schwarz and his colleagues examined whether the simple act of cleaning would eliminate the impact of previous good or bad luck on future risk taking.13
Most of us face the dilemma of how much risk to allow in various spheres of our lives. The classic example is investments. We can simply hold on to our money, invest in a safe bet that gives a very small percentage return per year, or buy stocks that may give us higher profits with a potential for great losses. My investment consultant always asks me how much risk I am willing to take. Would I like to invest in equity at a rate of 10 percent, 30 percent, or 50 percent? If I say 50 percent, I am assuming a bigger risk; I have a chance of making a better profit, but also a greater chance to lose. The same principle applies to real estate. One dilemma investors commonly face is whether to buy a given property while the market is down. It seems like a good investment, since there is a good chance that prices will go up. Nevertheless, there is a risk associated with the purchase since prices may continue to go down. Some people are willing to take that risk, win or lose, and others simply are not.
Many factors are at play in determining how great a risk we want to take, including, of course, our personalities. One of those factors is how lucky we feel. I once put 50 percent of my assets in an equity investment and lost almost all of it. I had taken a big risk and gotten burned. For a long time I felt unlucky and did not dare invest more than 20 percent of my assets in equity, even when the market seemed promising.
Risk taking is abundantly evident in casinos. When people win and feel lucky, they tend to continue gambling and take more risks, believing that they will continue to win. The researchers examined whether hand washing would decrease the effect of previous luck, good or bad, on risk taking. They asked fifty business students to participate in a study. Half of the students were asked to recall a recent incident in wh
ich they were lucky financially, such as winning a lottery. The other half were asked to recall an incident in which they were unlucky financially, such as buying several lottery tickets and not winning with any of them. Students described the incidents and their feelings. Following their descriptions, the students were asked to evaluate an antiseptic wipe in another allegedly unrelated product evaluation study. As in the studies on cognitive dissonance, half of the students from each group just examined the wipe without using it, while the other half were asked to use the wipe to clean their hands.
Finally, in the last part of the study, the participants were asked to assume the role of a CEO and to decide whether to improve the company’s product. They were told that if they were to reject the decision, profits would remain the same, $20 million a year. If they decided to improve the product, then there was a 75 percent chance that the profits would rise to $24 million a year but a 25 percent chance that they would drop to $12 million a year.
Among those who did not clean their hands, the familiar phenomenon emerged once again: those who recalled a good-luck episode took the risk more often than did those who recalled a bad-luck episode. Simply put, the luckier they felt, the more risk they were willing to take. Nothing surprising about that. The interesting part is that the previous experience of good or bad luck did not seem to influence the risk taking of those who cleaned their hands. In short, cleaning the hands eliminated the influence of previous luck, good or bad.
To see if they could replicate these extraordinary results, the researchers conducted an additional study, this time having the participants actually play a game where they could win or lose money and consequently feel lucky or unlucky. As in the first study, they also asked the participants to evaluate an organic soap, with half of the participants simply examining the soap and the other half washing their hands with it. Then the researchers measured how much risk participants were willing to take in a betting game.
