“Wash away my troubles, wash away my pain,” goes the song. Is there such a thing as soap and water for the psyche? Yes: Metaphor is that powerful, say Spike W.S. Lee and Norbert Schwarz of the University of Michigan in a literature review appearing in the latest issue ofCurrent Directions in Psychological Science, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science.
Religious rites like baptism make psychological sense, the article suggests. Says Lee: “Cleansing is about the removal of residues.” By washing the hands, taking a shower, or even thinking of doing so, “people can rid themselves of a sense of immorality, lucky or unlucky feelings, or doubt about a decision. The bodily experience of removing physical residues can provide the basis of removing more abstract mental residues.”
One study the authors discuss found that people asked to judge the moral wrongdoing of others saw them as worse when exposed to an unkempt room or bad odor than when sitting in a clean room. In another study, participants asked to think of a moral wrongdoing of their own felt less guilty after using an antiseptic hand wipe; they were also less likely to volunteer for a good deed to assuage that guilt. Even imagining yourself either “clean and fresh” or “dirty and stinky” affects your judgments of others’ acts, such as masturbation or abortion. The “clean” participants in one study not only judged others more harshly, they judged themselves as more moral than others. [continue reading…]
On a particular visit to Canada from the UK my mum declared me to have low moral standards! Gosh what had I done you may well ask? Before you let your imaginations run wild, she actually was in despair that I allowed my children’s bedrooms to accumulate mess and clutter!
Not what a good girl like me had been brought up to encourage!
Ma I think you confused low morality with ‘less than high standards of tidyiness’ oops mea culpa!
However like most people if asked whether I’d steal, like most I would say no. Would I try to save a drowning person? That depends—perhaps on our fear of big waves which in my case is hampered by being a very bad swimmer! Much research has explored the ways we make moral decisions. But in the clinch, when the opportunity arises to do good or bad, how well do our predictions match up with the actions we actually take? [continue reading…]
Nothing captures human attention more than a moral dilemma. Whether we are soap opera fanatics or not, we can’t help sticking our noses in other people’s affairs, pronouncing our views on right and wrong, justified or not. For millennia, philosophers have speculated about how people make moral decisions, what decisions they make, and what decisions they ought to make. To this rich history of theory the Psychology Department at Harvard University hopes to contribute some data — with your help. Their aim is to use data from the Moral Sense Test,(MST) as well as other experiments, to characterize the nature of our moral psychology, how it evolved, and how it develops in our species, creating individuals with moral responsibilities. The MST has been designed for all humans who are curious about that puzzling little word “ought” — about the principles that make one action right and another wrong.
You have the opportunity to participate in the Moral Sense Test right now. The test is short, and your responses are completely confidential. For more information, read the privacy statement.
Behavioral economist Dan Ariely studies the bugs in our moral code: the hidden reasons we think it’s OK to cheat or steal (sometimes). Clever studies help make his point that we’re Predictably Irrational— and can be influenced in ways we can’t grasp.Â
“Wash away my troubles, wash away my pain,” goes the song. Is there such a thing as soap and water for the psyche? Yes: Metaphor is that powerful, say Spike W.S. Lee and Norbert Schwarz of the University of Michigan in a literature review appearing in the latest issue ofCurrent Directions in Psychological Science, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science.
