by Thalma Lobel
The “ethical man” story was about a lawyer who found a misplaced document that was much needed by a colleague in order to successfully argue a case and did the right thing—he placed it on his colleague’s desk, without even taking credit for his kind deed. The “unethical man” story was about a lawyer who found the same missing document but kept mum and shredded the document, thus ensuring his colleague’s failure and paving the way for his own promotion.
Here’s the clever part: the students were then asked, in a supposedly different study, to rate the desirability of several products on a seven-point scale. Some of the products were cleansing products, such as Crest toothpaste, Dove soap, and Tide laundry detergent; there were also unrelated products, such as Nantucket Nectars juices, Sony CD cases, and Snickers bars. Those who copied the story about the unethical worker found the cleansing-related items more desirable than did those who copied the ethical story. No difference was found in ratings of the products unrelated to cleansing. After the simple act of handwriting a first-person account about an unethical deed, participants demonstrated greater interest in self-cleansing. The participants acted as if some of the “psychological scum” of the unethical lawyer could be scrubbed off by physical cleaning.
These three studies present an interesting notion of “mental cleanliness.” Our unethical deeds may really cling to our psyches like a layer of grime, making us feel the urge to wash ourselves until we are pure again. At the very least, the findings show that our misdeeds (and even misdeeds that aren’t ours) linger in our minds and have an effect on us.
Psychologists and psychiatrists have coined the term mental pollution to describe a feeling of dirtiness that may be caused by unethical deeds or thoughts, moral criticism, or physical or sexual assault. People who feel they are mentally polluted often want to clean themselves. Canadian researchers asked a group of female students to imagine a nonconsensual kiss at a party and asked another group to imagine a consensual kiss.2 Those who imagined the nonconsensual kiss felt dirtier, and some wanted to wash out their mouths. The students who imagined a consensual kiss did not have these reactions. Although the nonconsensual kiss was only imaginary, even the thought of it was enough to make the women feel polluted.
A magazine reporter interviewed young mothers who worked as prostitutes during the day, while their children were at school or in the nursery.3 Most of the women were single mothers who sold sex in order to pay their bills and support their children. A social worker who knew them well said that at the end of the day most of them washed and cleaned themselves as if to purify themselves. The act meant more to them than just physical cleaning. They felt polluted by their day’s work and cleaned themselves for a very long time before allowing themselves to return to their children.
Naughty Parts: The Body Broken Down by Guilt
We use different parts of our bodies to perform unethical acts. People lie and swear with their mouths, steal with their hands, and run away on their legs even when staying would be the right thing to do. Other body parts, which we need not discuss in detail, are famous for getting men and women (even presidents and heads of armed forces) into all manner of moral and ethical quandaries.
In 1993 the case of John and Lorena Bobbitt, a Virginia couple, received a lot of media attention. John had an alleged history of abuse and infidelity, and one night he returned home from a party, intoxicated, and allegedly raped his wife while she was sleeping. Lorena went to the kitchen, got a knife, and cut off nearly half of her husband’s penis. Why did she punish him in such a way?
Historically, religions have linked the ethical quality of certain actions with the body parts that perform them. Both the Bible and the Quran punish the particular part of the body involved in unethical behavior. They demand localized suffering. The Bible says: “May the LORD cut off all flattering lips, the tongue that speaketh proud things” (Psalms 12:3). And in Proverbs, it is written: “From the mouth of the righteous comes the fruit of wisdom, but a perverse tongue will be silenced” (10:31).
In the Quran, theft is punished by imprisonment, but in extreme cases by amputation of hands. “As for the man who steals and the woman who steals,” it says, “cut off the hand of either of them in requital for what they have wrought, as a deterrent ordained by God: for God is almighty, wise” (5:38).
Although theft is punished by amputation only in extreme cases, the message is there. The punishment is designed to fit the part of the body that committed the crime. Freud coined the term castration anxiety to refer to the unconscious fear of a boy who, at an early stage of his development, is attracted to his mother and sees his father as his rival. According to Freud, the boy associates the punishment, castration, with the body part involved in the sin.
Is it possible that people not only want to clean themselves after immoral behavior but also want to clean the specific part of the body that was involved in this moral transgression? If our abstract concepts are grounded in our bodily experiences, then it is likely that cleansing is related to the specific action or motor behavior. To measure this association, researchers asked eighty-seven students to imagine that they were working as lawyers and competing with a colleague.4 As in the study about honest and unethical actions, the lawyer finds a crucially important document belonging to a competitor. The participant then is asked to deliver an unethical message to the colleague—a lie stating that he or she had not found the document. Half of the students delivered the message via voice mail, and the other half via e-mail.
Like the other studies, this one had an “unrelated” product survey, in which the researchers asked the students to rate the desirability of various products. Among the several products were two in which the researchers were most interested: mouthwash and hand sanitizer. Students who delivered the unethical message via e-mail, and therefore used their hands, found the hand sanitizer more desirable. In contrast, students who delivered the lie via voice mail, and therefore used their mouths, found the mouthwash more desirable. The test subjects wanted to clean the part of the body with which they had told a lie. It seems that just as we want to wash our hands and feet after they touch something dirty, we feel the need to clean the exact body part involved in a moral transgression.
Cruel punishments like amputations do not exist in most civilized countries today, but associations between body parts and their deeds remain in the public conscience. On blogs, where more deviant impulses, whether political, legal, or social, can still be expressed anonymously, it is not hard to find calls for embodied revenge. For example, several bloggers suggested that the tongue of a woman who falsely accused someone of attacking her should be amputated. Despite our cultural modernity, the minds of many of us are still prone to making these automatic connections. Plus, who can ever forget the most well-known threatened punishment for cursing, voiced by parents and schoolteachers: “I’m going to wash your mouth out with soap!” There is an embodied reason this threat may never go out of style.
Does Cleaning Make Us Feel Morally Pure?
While we know that we have a greater urge to clean ourselves when we do something immoral, does this unconscious compensation really work? Does physical cleaning really cleanse our conscience and wash away our guilty feelings? Can you lie to a friend, then wash your hands (or, even better, your mouth) and feel somewhat better about the whole thing?
Zhong and Liljenquist conducted another experiment that explored this question.5 Undergraduate students were asked to recall an unethical deed and type it into a computer. Immediately afterward half of the students were asked to wipe their hands with an antiseptic cleansing wipe and were told that this action was recommended after using someone else’s keyboard. The other half were not asked to clean their hands. Subsequently, all the participants were asked if they would help a desperate graduate student by volunteering to take part in a study without pay. The researchers assumed people who had the lingering feeling that they had done something immoral or unethical would feel guilty and therefore would try to
compensate for their act by doing a good deed, such as volunteering.
Indeed, they found that 74 percent of those who did not clean their hands volunteered to help, while only 41 percent of those who had cleaned their hands volunteered. For those who had cleaned their hands, that simple act was enough to abate the feelings of guilt that had been brought up by recalling the unethical deed. They’d already “cleaned” their conscience. For those who did not clean their hands, the urge to soothe that guilt pushed them to volunteer at a much higher rate. These results suggest that physical cleaning indeed clears our conscience.
I further investigated this question with my students at Tel Aviv University.I We wondered whether people who are physically clean have a higher tolerance for cheating and committing other dubious acts. Basically, we posited that you have more “room” for moral dirt when your physical “slate” is clean.
In our study, two students went to the university gym and stood near the door leading to the shower stalls in order to approach two groups of people: people who had just finished working out and were on their way to the showers and those who had just finished showering. Each person was asked to participate in a short study and was told that the study examined the influence of physical training on memory.
Participants from both groups received “general knowledge” questionnaires composed of thirteen questions. Nine of the questions were extremely difficult, bordering on impossible to answer, while four were very easy. We had assembled these questions from earlier research (a pretest). In the pretest we had asked students to answer some easy and some very difficult questions. We chose for the easy questions on the shower test those that pretest takers had unanimously answered correctly, and we chose as difficult questions those that not even one of the pretest participants had answered even partially correctly. For example, one of our easy questions was “How many centimeters are there in one meter?” while one of our difficult questions was “In what year was the stethoscope invented?” We chose a ratio of four easy and nine difficult to ensure that participants would get a failing score (four easy questions out of thirteen is about 30 percent).
We chose to measure cheating by enabling participants to self-score their tests. Each participant was given the correct answer key, asked to check her or his answers, and instructed to write the score on a separate page. After this, participants would hand over to the experimenter only the last page, on which they had written their scores, and tear up their original tests and put them in the recycling bin. Participants were certain that there was no way for the administrators of the test to determine their actual performance. They felt free to misreport. They didn’t know that we didn’t need to see the tests to know their scores, those cheaters.
Those who answered the questionnaire before the shower, when they were still sweaty, cheated less than those who answered the questionnaire after the shower, when they felt clean. Our study confirmed that those who felt clean on the outside felt “clean” enough on the inside to be able to falsify their test scores and report that they had correctly answered some of the impossible questions. It was as if they felt a “morality surplus” while clean, as if they had moral character to spare and could thus cheat.
In a second study that I conducted with my studentII we wanted to examine whether cleansing for the purpose of purification would influence donation behavior. We conducted this study in the mikveh, the traditional Jewish communal bath for purification, on two special days: the Jewish New Year (Rosh Hashanah) and the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur). The ten days between these two holidays are called the High Holy Days, or the Days of Awe. According to the Jewish tradition, on New Year’s Day God writes in the book of life the names of those who will live and those who will die, and he seals it with the verdict on the Day of Atonement, the holiest day of the year. This period is therefore a time for soul-searching, during which believers seek to make amends and ask for forgiveness for wrongdoing. Observers also go to wash in the mikveh to purify themselves. Another tradition in the Days of Awe is charity; representatives of various organizations commonly set up stands outside the mikveh asking for donations from the visitors.
We examined whether men were likely to donate more before washing themselves in the mikveh or after. We predicted that those who were on their way to the mikveh would have a greater need for purification and would therefore donate more money than those who had just purified themselves.
We situated ourselves a few meters from the entrance and exit of the mikveh with the stand of a real charitable organization that distributes food to the needy. We set up a table with flyers presenting information about the organization’s activities and open boxes where people could put their financial donations. A volunteer who was blind to the purpose of the study manned the table and wrote down the sum of each donation and whether the person had donated before or after washing. And we did indeed find that people donated more before they washed than after they washed in the mikveh.
These results might seem counterintuitive. You might think that when your body is clean, your moral behavior would be clean as well. However, intuition alone cannot unravel the web of connections between our senses and our minds. Our findings suggest that physical cleaning influences moral transgressions. Physical cleanliness is relative, and the moral mechanism seems to operate only when we become cleaner than we were. As we’ve seen, physical cleansing reduces guilt.
Physical dirtiness is conceptually and metaphorically linked to immorality. By cleaning themselves and removing the dirt, individuals cleansed their conscience, thereby granting themselves license to cheat and decreasing the impulse to help others. With a clean conscience and less guilt, individuals seem able to commit at least minor moral transgressions more easily. Something about being physically clean resonates with the psyche, indicating to the conscience that a person has a moral “clean slate” that can afford some smudging. It is as if, by cleaning their conscience, participants had more “slack” to commit moral transgressions. In contrast, when we are physically unclean, we seem to have a lower tolerance for our own misdeeds and are more sensitive to guilt. We associate physical dirt with an unclean conscience and so do not allow ourselves to further transgress. These phenomena, the way the mind and body affect each other, are what embodiment is about.
Disgust, Cleanliness, and Moral Judgment
What determines moral judgments? Why is one behavior judged harshly while another is forgiven? Why is the same act perceived by one person as benign and by another as a serious moral transgression that deserves harsh punishment? There is no doubt that our values, upbringing, perspectives, and personalities influence our moral judgments, but some situational variables also bend and adjust them. Can a simple environmental factor, like the cleanliness of a room or its smell, affect our judgments? Does physical disgust lead us to be morally disgusted and harsher in our judgments? Indeed, recent research has started to link our capacity for disgust to our moral views.
Early in life we begin to register physical disgust evoked by rotten foods and bad smells. Evolutionary psychologists believe that physical disgust is an adaptation that developed early in our evolution to keep us away from disease-causing organisms. We are revolted by guts and gore because contact with them can make us sick. But behaviors unrelated to disease also disgust us, and researchers believe that there is a link between disgust related to diseases and moral disgust. Some behaviors that have little to do with the avoidance of infection are often described using the language of disgust. They may actually leave a bad taste in the mouth. For instance, we feel disgusted when we hear about a man who betrayed his best friend or when we hear of murder, adultery, and incest. Physical disgust and moral disgust produce similar vocal and facial expressions and activate some of the same brain regions, which indicate that they might influence one another.6
Several studies have recently examined whether disgust evoked by physical factors such as bad smells or contaminated objects influences how wrong we think certain m
oral transgressions are. These studies induced physical disgust by various means and then presented participants with scenarios describing moral transgressions or dilemmas and asked them to judge how wrong these issues were. In one study the experimenters sprayed a disgusting smell, a fart spray (in the name of science), not far from the participants while they were answering the questionnaire.7 In another study the participants drank a disgustingly bitter drink.8 The moral transgressions included vignettes about stealing library books, offering a bribe, and shoplifting. The moral dilemmas included issues such as sex and legalization of marriage between first cousins. Some of the studies included a scenario about a man eating his own dead dog.
The results clearly demonstrated that those who were physically disgusted (by smelling a disgusting smell or tasting a disgusting drink) were harsher in their moral judgments compared with those who were not exposed to bad odors or who drank sweet or neutral drinks. In other words, the same behavior was judged as more morally wrong if the person who made the judgment was subjected to unpleasant odors or a disgusting drink. Physical disgust influenced moral disgust. It’s as if the human brain can be “made ready” to feel or generate moral disgust by triggering the evolutionary process of physical disgust.
Yet it is possible that washing hands will wash away this influence of disgust on moral judgment. A group of researchers induced disgust in their participants by showing them a repulsive movie clip, after which half of the participants washed their hands.9 All participants were then asked to judge several behaviors. Those who had washed their hands after watching the disgusting film clip judged immoral behavior less harshly than did those who did not wash their hands. The cleaning seemed to rinse away their disgust or at least its influence.