It was a similar story in a follow-up study with hundreds of participants recruited via a nation-wide database. Those primed to feel clean by reading a short passage that began 'My hair feels clean and light. My breath is fresh ...' made far harsher moral judgements about 16 social issues compared with those primed to feel dirty by a passage beginning, 'My hair feels oily and heavy. My breath stinks ...'
A third study was identical to the second, except that after reading either the dirty or clean passage of text the 136 undergrad participants also ranked themselves against their peers on several factors including intelligence, attractiveness and moral character. As before, those primed with the clean text made more harsh moral judgements on social issues. Crucially, this association was entirely mediated by their having an inflated sense of moral virtuosity compared with their peers (by contrast, reading the clean vs. dirty text made no difference to self rankings on the other factors).
'Acts of cleanliness have not only the potential to shift our moral pendulum to a more virtuous self, but also license harsher moral judgement of others,' Zhong and his team concluded.
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Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
Link to earlier related post: Your conscience really can be wiped clean.
3 comments:
Curious. I wonder if we're predisposed to accepting immoral acts if we're less clean.
Very interesting, but I can actually easily believe it. It would be interesting to do the same study in a more indigenous community. I think the results could change quite radically.
I can think of two possibilities here.
An evolution theorist would claim that being dirty means that we are poor. If we are poor, committing immoral acts (such as theft) ensure our survival.
Another man would say that being dirty throws the test subjects out of their norm (not to mention status, exemplified by the comments on their hair or breath), thus forcing them to think more about themselves than about others, giving less thought about other's immoral deeds.
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