Karachi, Pakistan, households that were (vs. were not) given handwashing ..... violence may mute people's moral distress and associated desires for .... 12 intensification effect on people's judgment towards others' immoral behaviors.
1 Citation: Lee, S. W. S., & Schwarz N. (in press). Clean-moral effects and clean-slate effects: Physical cleansing as an embodied procedure of psychological separation. In R. Duschinksy, S. Schnall, & D. Weiss (Eds.), Purity and danger now: New perspectives. London: Routledge.
Clean-Moral Effects and Clean-Slate Effects: Physical Cleansing as an Embodied Procedure of Psychological Separation
Spike W. S. Lee University of Toronto
Norbert Schwarz University of Southern California
2 Handwashing is one of the easiest and most effective opportunities to enjoy substantial health benefits. Meta-analytic evidence associates handwashing with reduction in risks of diarrhea diseases by 42-47%, severe intestinal infections by 48%, and shigellosis by 59%; extrapolation analyses suggest that handwashing could avert 0.5-1.4 million potential diarrhea deaths (Curtis & Cairncross, 2014). In a randomized controlled trial of 906 households in Karachi, Pakistan, households that were (vs. were not) given handwashing promotion and plain soap showed substantial reductions in childhood incidences of pneumonia (by 50%) and acute lower-respiratory infections (e.g., diarrhea by 53%). Antibacterial soap worked similarly well (Luby et al., 2005) on these two clinical syndromes that bring about the most childhood deaths around the world, especially in poor communities in developing countries. Similar effects of handwashing promotion on respiratory-tract infections and respiratory illness have been found among children and adults in developed countries including Canada, Australia, and the U.S. (Carabin et al., 1999; Master, Hess Longe, & Dickson, 1997; Niffenegger, 1997; Roberts et al., 2000; Ryan, Christian, & Wohlrabe, 2001). The health impact of handwashing is significant enough that October 15 is designated as the annual Global Handwashing Day, when people all over the world are educated about the practices and benefits of effective handwashing. Thanks to the cheap mass production and global reach of soaps and detergents since the 20th century, their physical properties have been meticulously documented (American Cleaning Institute, 2015). Cleanliness has become a fabric of modern life, a part of our daily routine, an easy mechanism for the avoidance of contamination, pollution, and diseases to enhance our chances of survival (Feder, 2015). But cleanliness comes with more than just physical properties and biological benefits—it has rich symbolic meanings, in both primitive and modern cultures, religious communities and secular societies, an insight given by Mary Douglas (1966) in her
3 classic collection of anthropological observations half a century ago. Experimental research in the last decade has vastly expanded upon this theme to generate causal evidence that cleanliness provides mental and behavioral benefits across many domains of contemporary life. These psychological aspects and consequences of cleanliness are the focus of our chapter. At first glance, the association of cleanliness with abstract symbolic meanings seems like a matter of faith. The proverb goes, “Cleanliness is next to godliness.” Across the world’s major religions, ritual purification symbolizes spiritual purification, as in Christians’ baptism, Judaists’ mikvah, Muslims’ and Buddhists’ ablution, Hindus’ bathing in the Ganges River, and Sikhs’ amrit. The religious overtones are so obvious that even non-religious people unconsciously associate purity with religiosity (Preston & Ritter, 2012). Yet cleanliness is not limited to religious contexts. As we review the burgeoning body of psychological research on cleanliness in this chapter, we will first see that cleanliness is linked to numerous moral experiences, which have received the lion’s share of empirical and theoretical attention. But the story turns out to be much broader than that. Cleanliness exerts psychological effects far beyond the realm of morality: A sense of cleanliness appears to wipe the mental slate clean. It reduces the residual influence of threats to different facets of the self as well as the residual influence of various positive experiences. Merely cleaning one’s hands with an antiseptic wipe, for example, is enough to reduce one’s guilt (Zhong & Liljenquist, 2006), doubts (Lee & Schwarz, 2010a), and the impact of previous streaks of good or bad luck (A. Xu, Zwick, & Schwarz, 2012). Clean-slate effects appear valence- and domain-general, leading us to conceptualize physical cleansing as an embodied procedure of psychological separation. This procedural perspective integrates existing findings, reveals possible deeper mechanisms, and makes novel predictions about the boundary conditions of clean-slate effects.
4 Clean and Moral Most psychological research on cleanliness has focused on its metaphorical associations with morality, consistent with the dominant theme of Douglas’s (1966) seminal work. In current theorizing, the link between cleanliness and morality is often traced to a conceptual metaphor that embodies abstract thoughts about morality in concrete experiences of cleanliness (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Landau, Meier, & Keefer, 2010; Lee & Schwarz, 2011, 2014). Numerous expressions – from “clean hands and a pure heart” to “dirty thoughts and filthy behaviors” – illustrate the close connection in all languages studied. It is assumed to result from the scaffolding of higher mental processes upon lower sensorimotor processes over developmental time (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999; Williams, Huang, & Bargh, 2009). It is also compatible with the principle of neural reuse, which assumes that existing neural mechanisms acquire new functions over evolutionary time (Anderson, 2010). Some findings support the assumption that moral experiences implicate an embodied metaphorical link to cleanliness. For example, when people were induced to convey a lie on voicemail (using their mouth), they were subsequently attracted to mouthwash, but not hand sanitizer; conversely, when induced to convey the lie on email (using their hands), they were attracted to hand sanitizer, but not mouthwash (Lee & Schwarz, 2010b). Moreover, their evaluation of mouth-cleaning vs. hand-washing products was associated with higher activities in the respective sensorimotor neural regions (Denke, Rotte, Heinze, & Schaefer, 2014; Schaefer, Rotte, Heinze, & Denke, 2015). The assumption that the conceptual metaphor is grounded in sensorimotor modalities further predicts that moral experiences should influence basic sensorimotor experiences of cleanliness and vice versa (cf. Lee & Schwarz, 2012). Observing that clean and dirty are often represented in white and black colors, G. Sherman and Clore (2009,
5 Study 1) demonstrated that people judged the color of a word more quickly when moral words were shown in white and immoral words in black than vice versa. The more strongly people showed the effect on this moral Stroop task, the more desirable they judged shower soap and toothpaste to be (Study 3). Furthermore, embodied conceptual metaphors are conducive to multimodal priming (Lee, in press), so moral effects should be evoked by cleanliness experience in its various modalities. Numerous studies, as we will now review, show that tactile, olfactory, and visual experiences of cleanliness are capable of changing both moral self-evaluation and moral judgments and behaviors towards others. Cleanliness and the Moral Self Feeling immoral elicits the pursuit of cleanliness. For example, after describing their past unethical (vs. ethical) behavior, people completed more cleansing-related word fragments and became more likely to choose an antiseptic wipe over a pencil as a free gift (Zhong & Liljenquist, 2006, Studies 1 & 3). Subtle procedures such as hand-copying a story, written in the first-person perspective, of an unethical (vs. ethical) lawyer also increased people’s desires for cleaning but not non-cleaning products (Study 2). But blatant procedures backfire. For example, when people were first asked to complete 183 items about their conscientiousness, which invoked concepts such as how orderly and organized they are, then describing their past unethical (vs. ethical) behavior did not increase their likelihood of choosing an antiseptic wipe over a pencil as a free gift (Fayard, Bassi, Bernstein, & Roberts, 2009, Study 1). A possible reason was that completing many items about being orderly and organized made these meanings salient and made it more likely that people saw a link between being orderly and being ethical. As observed in many social cognition studies, awareness of a potential influence elicits mental corrections that counteract the otherwise observed effect (e.g., Strack, Schwarz, Bless, Kübler, &
6 Wänke; 1993; for a review, see Schwarz, 2015). Physical cleansing confers a sense of morality and boosts moral self-evaluation. For example, after describing their past unethical behavior, people who had (vs. did not have) an opportunity to use an antiseptic wipe reported lower feelings of disgust, regret, guilt, shame, embarrassment, and anger, and became less likely to volunteer their time for an unpaid experiment, presumably because they felt morally cleansed and were less driven to engage in compensatory prosocial behavior (Zhong & Liljenquist, Study 4). Quasi-experimental work also shows that people cheated more after (vs. before) taking a shower (Lobel et al., 2015, Study 1) and donated less money to charity after (vs. before) bathing for religious purification (Study 2). Because active moral concerns can interfere with other cognitive tasks, we may further expect cleansing to reduce these interference effects. Indeed, after describing a past unethical behavior, people who had (vs. did not have) an antiseptic wipe to use showed weaker interference effects in a Stroop task (but not more facilitation effects), weaker interference effects in an object interference task, and faster stop-signal reaction time in a stop-signal task (Kalanthroff, Aslan, & Dar, 2015). Apparently, cleansing increases cognitive flexibility, presumably by freeing people’s minds from ruminating about moral failures. Vicarious Experience of Morality and Cleanliness Vicarious experience of a behavior is weaker in intensity than direct enactment of the behavior (Barsalou, 2008). Hence, vicarious manipulations of morality, like copying a story about someone else’s immoral behavior, are likely to come with less reliable cleanliness effects than recalling one’s own immoral behavior (e.g., Earp, Everett, Madva, & Hamlin, 2014). Similarly, vicarious manipulations of cleansing are likely to exert weaker moral effects. For example, after describing an incident of doing something bad to someone, people
7 who experienced vicarious cleansing by watching a 2-min video of someone else typing numbers on a keyboard and wiping the fingers, palm, and back of both hands (vs. of someone else typing numbers on a keyboard only) were less likely to complete and return some questionnaires 3 weeks later, but the effects were weaker than if people actually typed the numbers themselves and wiped their own fingers, palm, and back of both hands (H. Xu, Bègue, & Bushman, 2014). The observed linear effect of self vs. other vs. no wiping on the number of questionnaires completed and returned was mediated by participants’ state guilt, suggesting that direct cleansing had stronger effects than vicarious cleansing on both immediate guilty feelings and subsequent guilt-driven behavior weeks later. Cleanliness and the Moral Self in Social Comparison Moral self-evaluation is subject to social comparison (Festinger, 1954). For example, in an experiment allegedly about food preferences (Cramwinckel, van Dijk, Scheepers, & van den Bos, 2013, Study 1), people tasted a meat sausage and then encountered another “participant” (actually a confederate) who refused to taste the sausage for moral (vs. non-moral) reasons. People disliked the moral refuser more and showed physiological changes that indicated a motivational state of threat, presumably because social comparison with the moral refuser threatened one’s own moral standing. But if people had an opportunity to clean their hands, they liked the moral refuser more, considered the moral refuser less agentic, and evaluated themselves more positively, especially if they had a strong moral identity (Study 2). When people think about their own moral failures, they become particularly sensitive to others’ moral failures, which provide an opportunity for self-serving social comparisons (“Look, others are worse than me, so I’m not too bad”). Accordingly, people condemn others who have moral failures as dirtier and more evil and, by contrast, see themselves as cleaner and more
8 moral. For example, people who read about a target person being guilty of theft and punished (vs. guilty but not punished, or vs. not guilty) reported feeling physically cleaner themselves, but only if they had been asked to recall their own unethical experience beforehand, not if they had been asked to recall a very boring experience (Rothschild, Landau, Keefer, & Sullivan, 2015, Study 1). Recalling their own unethical (vs. a very boring) experience also increased people’s tendency to judge a hit-and-run driver (described in an article with his photo shown) as evil (Study 3) and as physically dirty, mediated by higher levels of their own current feelings of guilt (Study 2). A Clean, Moral Self in Different Areas of Life Cleanliness is linked to moral concerns in many important areas of life, such as law and violence, business, and sex. In court proceedings, evidence that is obtained through illegal means is often considered legally “dirty”. Indeed, lawyers and law students who were induced (vs. not induced) to use inadmissible evidence (produced from a police officer’s racially motivated search) were more likely to choose a small bottle of Purell hand disinfectant over a highlighter pen as a free gift (Bilz, 2012, Study 3), paralleling findings in other domains of moral transgression. Similarly, people who read criminal (vs. neutral) vignettes completed more cleansing- and disgust-related word fragments and were more likely to choose an antiseptic wipe or soap over a pen holder as a free gift (Jones & Fitness, 2008, Study 1). After playing a video game involving violence against humans (vs. objects), people were more likely to choose cleaning products, an effect that was mediated by greater moral distress and that emerged only among inexperienced players, not among experienced ones (Gollwitzer & Melzer, 2012). This suggests that repeated exposure to violence may mute people’s moral distress and associated desires for cleanliness.
9 In the business world, networking is valued, but when motivated by dubious goals, it can feel dirty and elicit the pursuit of cleanliness (Casciaro, Gino, & Kouchaki, 2014). For example, recalling an experience of instrumental (vs. spontaneous) networking increased people’s tendency to complete cleansing-related word fragments; this effect was stronger for recall of professional (vs. personal) networking (Study 1). Even reading a story and imagining being the main character who engaged in professional instrumental (vs. personal spontaneous) networking could increase people’s desires for cleaning over non-cleaning products, mediated by their stronger feelings of dirtiness, inauthenticity, and discomfort; it also increased their negative but not positive affect (Study 2). Actually sending a message for professional networking via LinkedIn (vs. personal networking via Facebook) increased people’s desires for cleaning but not non-cleaning products, although only among people who were assigned a low-power (vs. highpower) role (Study 4). Power may moderate cleanliness effects because being in a low-power role may elicit conformist intentions and inauthentic behaviors, which leave people with a sense of impurity. For example, people who recalled experiences of being inauthentic (vs. authentic) to themselves reported lower moral self-regard and stronger feelings of impurity (Gino, Kouchaki, & Galinsky, 2015, Study 1), completed more cleansing-related word fragments, and judged cleaning products and behaviors but not non-cleaning products and behaviors as more desirable (Study 2), regardless of whether their recalled inauthentic (vs. authentic) experience involved lying (vs. telling the truth) to others or not. People who described an experience of being inauthentic to themselves (vs. failing an activity, or vs. their activities from the previous day) were also more likely to volunteer time to the experimenter, mediated by stronger feelings of impurity (Study 3). These effects appear to be driven by a link between inauthenticity and impurity rather than by
10 cognitive dissonance, as writing a counterattitudinal (vs. proattitudinal) essay increased people’s desires for cleaning but not non-cleaning products, regardless of whether they wrote the counterattitudinal essay with a high or low sense of choice (Study 4). If the effect were driven by cognitive dissonance, the sense of choice should have mattered; it did not. Finally, using a cleansing product (hand sanitizer; vs. examining a pen) decreased people’s likelihood and amount of donation if they had recalled an experience of being inauthentic to themselves, but not if they had recalled an experience of being authentic to themselves (Study 5). Sexual behavior is of particular interest to the clean-moral link because sex is more inherently physical than other moral concerns, such as fairness, and it has been at the center of an ongoing debate about the theoretical structure of morality (cf. Giner-Sorolla & Sabo, this volume; see also the debate among Frimer, Gray, Haidt, and Pizarro at SPSP 2016). Empirically, men who listened to an audio recording to vividly imagine non-consensually (vs. consensually) kissing a young woman at a party later showed higher levels of self-reported dirtiness (Rachman, Radomsky, Elliott, & Zysk 2012, Studies 1-4), actual washing behaviors (Studies 2 & 3), urges to wash (Studies 3 & 4), as well as increases in anxiety, shame, anger, guilt, and sadness (Study 4). Conversely, being the victim of sexual innuendo triggers dirty feelings. Women who received objectifying (vs. non-objectifying) positive comments from a male confederate reported greater sinful feelings and stronger desires for cleaning but not non-cleaning products, both effects being mediated by increased feelings of dirtiness (Chen, Teng, & Zhang, 2013, Study 1). Women who recalled a social interaction with a man who objectified them (vs. responded appropriately) reported greater sinful feelings, mediated by an increased sense of contamination (Study 2), but this effect occurred only among women high on perceived personal responsibility
11 for being objectified, not among women low on it (Study 3). Summary Seeing oneself as immoral prompts one’s pursuit of cleanliness, which by metaphorical association boosts one’s moral self-evaluation. Both morality and cleanliness can be manipulated vicariously (as opposed to directly) to produce similar but weaker effects. One way to manipulate how moral people feel about themselves and others is by social comparison. Mutual influences between the moral self and physical cleanliness are observed in many important areas of life, such as law and violence, business networking, and sexual morality. Cleanliness and Moral Judgment and Behavior Towards Others One’s sense of cleanliness also shapes moral judgments and behaviors towards others. There are two broad ways to manipulate “the sense of cleanliness.” One is to manipulate actual cleansing (e.g., washing hands with soap, wiping hands with an antiseptic wipe), which is what researchers did in all of the studies reviewed above that examined cleanliness as an independent variable. Another way is to manipulate clean cues (e.g., clean scents, clean room). Both kinds of manipulation work by conferring a sense of cleanliness, but their exact effects depend on what the sense of cleanliness bears on and what precedes it (Lee & Schwarz, 2011). Such contextsensitivity is consistent with the malleable nature of inferences from other phenomenal experience (Schwarz, 2012) and affords a variety of judgmental and behavioral effects. If people are induced to feel immoral about their past transgressions, then a sense of cleanliness reduces their morally dirty feelings and they are less motivated to engage in compensatory prosocial behaviors and they feel more licensed to engage in self-interested behaviors (see the “Cleanliness and the Moral Self” section above). If people are induced to feel disgusted about the acts of someone else, then a sense of cleanliness reduces residual disgust and thus reduces its
12 intensification effect on people’s judgment towards others’ immoral behaviors. If no particular event precedes a manipulation of clean cues or actual cleansing, the sense of cleanliness may bear either on the self or on others. If it bears on others, it renders others’ immoral behaviors less dirty and less bad. If it bears on the self, one sees the self as cleaner and more moral and others as dirtier by comparison. Cleanliness Can Reduce Disgust and Its Effect on Moral Judgment Moral judgment is harsher when people experience disgust, even if the disgust was incidentally induced by watching an unrelated video clip (e.g., Schnall, Haidt, Clore, & Jordan, 2008). This impact of disgust is attenuated when people washed their hands prior to judgment (Schnall, Benton, & Harvey, 2008, Study 2). Similarly, using (vs. examining) an antiseptic wipe weakened the association between self-reported germ aversion and unfavorable attitudes towards outgroups (J. Y. Huang, Sedlovskaya, Ackerman, & Bargh, 2011, Study 3). Cleanliness Bearing on Others Can Soften Moral Judgment of Them People who unscrambled sentences containing cleanliness-related (vs. neutral) words judged moral transgressions as a little less wrong, despite no change in their negative or positive emotions (Schnall, Benton, & Harvey, 2008, Study 1). For this kind of manipulation to be effective though, it has to elicit relatively low processing effort (J. L. Huang, 2014), or else it may not work (Johnson, Cheung, & Donnellan, 2014), consistent with the finding that once primed cues are overly salient, they lose their influence on judgments (Strack et al., 1993; Schwarz, 2015). Extending beyond the conceptual activation of a sense of cleanliness through words, actual cleansing can reduce physiological changes as well as moral judgment. In a recent experiment (Kaspar, Krapp, & König, 2015), people saw a number of moral and immoral images
13 and judged how moral or immoral each was, while their eye movements were being tracked. Halfway through the task, there was a break. If people were prompted to wash their hands (vs. simply waited), afterwards they judged immoral images as less immoral and moral images as less moral, and showed corresponding changes in pupil size. Cleanliness Bearing on the Self Can Promote Moral Behavior Towards Others Incidental cleanliness cues can elicit moral behavior. For example, when people played a trust game in the recipient role, they were more cooperative and returned more money to the sender if they were in a room sprayed (vs. not sprayed) with citrus-scented Windex (Liljenquist, Zhong, & Galinsky, 2010, Study 1). The same manipulation also increased intention to volunteer for Habitat for Humanity and fund donation, despite little change in positive or negative affect (Study 2). The flip side of the beneficial effect of cleanliness cues is that dirtiness cues can reduce moral behavior. For example, vendors at a local farmers’ market who received a dirty (vs. clean) banknote from a “customer” (who was in fact a confederate) gave a smaller amount of vegetables to the customer on a second purchase (Yang, Zhou, Mead, Vohs, & Baumeister, 2013, Study 1). After people counted dirty (vs. clean) bills, they returned less money in a one-shot trust game (Study 2) and demanded less money for performing unfair or harmful behaviors (but not for performing behaviors that would violate ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, or purity/sanctity; Study 3). They also reciprocated less in rounds of prisoner’s dilemma games where they expected the partner to be a cooperator (but not in rounds where they expected the partner to be a defector; Study 4), and were less likely to reject small unfair offers in ultimatum games (but not unfair large offers or fair offers; Study 5). These behavioral effects of cleanliness and dirtiness cues are mediated by changes in
14 moral attitudes. Counting ordinary bills after reading a news article about how dirty the country’s paper currency was (vs. a recent weather report) decreased people’s offers in rounds of dictator games with allegedly different receivers, mediated by less positive ratings of exchange-related words (Study 6) or by increased agreement with greed-related sayings (Study 7). Conversely, counting ordinary bills after reading a news article about how clean the country’s paper currency was (vs. a recent weather report) increased people’s positive ratings of exchange-related words (Study 6) and increased their offers in rounds of dictator games with allegedly different receivers, mediated by decreased agreement with greed-related sayings and increased agreement with fairness-related ones (Study 7). Cleanliness Bearing on the Self Can Intensify Moral Judgment of Others People who were (vs. were not) asked to clean their hands with an antiseptic wipe judged various social issues as more immoral (Zhong, Strejcek, & Sivanathan, 2010, Study 1). Merely imagining cleansing can have similar effects. People who read a passage written in the firstperson perspective that prompted detailed visualization of being clean (vs. dirty, or vs. not reading anything) judged social issues as more immoral (Study 2), mediated by higher ranking of themselves over fellow students on moral character (but not on other dimensions; Study 3). Compared with my own clean and moral self, the social issues out there feel dirty and immoral. In addition to actual or imagined cleansing, subtle cues of cleanliness also change moral judgments and political attitudes. For example, simply being asked to “step over to the handsanitizer dispenser (vs. the wall) to complete the questionnaire” increased people’s self-reported conservative political attitudes in moral, social, and fiscal domains (Helzer & Pizarro, 2011, Study 1). This observation is consistent with the more general finding that conservatives put more value on purity and are more disgust-sensitive (Graham, Haidt, & Nosek, 2009; Haidt,
15 2012; Inbar, Pizarro, & Bloom, 2009). Similarly, people who completed a computer questionnaire next to a sign about cleanliness and after using an antiseptic wipe (vs. without the sign and without receiving any wipe) judged sexual purity violations to be more wrong, mediated by more conservative political attitudes (Study 2). Summary A sense of cleanliness, elicited by either subtle cues or actual cleansing, changes moral judgments and behaviors towards others. Depending on what it means and what it bears on, it can weaken compensatory prosociality and promote self-interested behaviors; or it can reduce disgust and soften moral judgments towards others; or it can render the self clean and moral, elicit identity-consistent moral behaviors, and make others’ immoral behaviors seem even more dirty and immoral. A full understanding of the moderating variables remains wanting.
Modality-Specific Grounding of Morality in Cleanliness All of the findings reviewed so far are consistent with two possible accounts. (1) Cleanliness is linguistically and semantically associated with morality. (2) Cleanliness is the embodied grounding of morality. Unlike the linguistic-semantic view, the embodied view assumes that mental representations of morality are grounded in sensorimotor modalities implicated in cleanliness. As such, it uniquely predicts modality-specific links between morality and cleanliness. These links emerge when a modality is temporarily or chronically salient. Temporarily Salient Modality Cleanliness effects are strongest on the specific modality made temporarily salient by a transgression. For example, people who had typed a lie on email (manual modality) evaluated hand sanitizer more favorably than mouthwash, whereas people who had told a lie on voicemail
16 (oral modality) evaluated mouthwash more favorably than hand sanitizer (Lee & Schwarz, 2010b; see Schaefer et al., 2015 for a replication). People who listened to a recording or rewrote a story that prompted them to vividly imagine having to borrow and use a cell phone from a gay (vs. heterosexual) man—which made the manual and oral modalities salient—completed more cleansing-related word fragments (Golec et al., 2014, Study 1), indicating that the task brought cleanliness concerns to mind. Acting on these concerns, they were more likely to choose a disinfecting wipe over a pencil as a free gift (Study 2) and evaluated disinfectant hand wash and mouthwash as more desirable, but not other body-cleaning, household-cleaning or non-cleaning products as more desirable (Study 3). Neural evidence further supports the role of temporarily salient modality in cleanliness effects. For example, favorable evaluation of mouth-cleaning products after lying was associated with neural activities in sensorimotor regions (Denke et al., 2014). Favorable evaluation of mouthwash products after lying in a voice mail and favorable evaluation of hand-wash products after lying in a written note were associated with the somatotopically organized neural activities (Schaefer et al., 2015). Chronically Salient Modality In the above studies, cleanliness effects were strongest on the modality involved in the transgression. Consistent with these temporary situational influences, cleanliness effects are also stronger on the specific modality that is chronically salient in a culture. For example, East Asians emphasize the face as a representation of their public self-image in sociomoral discourse. Accordingly, face-cleaning was more effective in reducing guilt and regret when ChineseCanadian biculturals were primed with their Chinese background than when primed with their Canadian background (Lee, Tang, Wan, Mai, & Liu, 2015, Study 1). When Chinese people used
17 an antiseptic wipe to clean their face, it freed them from guilt-driven compensatory prosocial behavior (Study 2), whereas cleaning their hands, or merely examining the wipe, did not. The effectiveness of facial cleansing as a coping mechanism is further supported by Chinese people’s specific interest in face-cleaning products and their tendency to engage in face-cleaning (vs. hands-cleaning) behavior in the wake of their own immorality (Study 3). Summary These lines of evidence indicate that the clean-moral association shows the strongest effects on whichever modality is salient, whether momentarily or chronically. The principle of modality salience is not predicted a priori by the amodal view that morality is merely linguistically or semantically associated with cleanliness. It is predicted a priori by the embodied view that morality is grounded in sensorimotor modalities responsible for cleanliness experience (see Lee & Schwarz, 2010b, for a discussion).
Individual Differences in Cleanliness and Morality The embodied grounding of morality in cleanliness predicts that people should make stronger moral judgment if they are sensitive to disgust (often evoked by dirtiness), to cleanliness, or to their bodily experience in general. They should also show stronger clean-moral effects if they have strong faith in their intuitions. Disgust Sensitivity and Moral Judgment Mock jurors high on disgust sensitivity exhibited a bias toward convicting criminals (Jones & Fitness, 2008, Study 2). Disgust-sensitive people also considered it more likely that suspects in crime vignettes were culpable, attributed more evilness to criminals, recommended longer sentences for criminals, and perceived higher community crime levels (Study 3). People
18 who frequently feel disgusted in daily life showed stronger disapproval of behaviors that violate the moral foundation of purity and stronger approval of behaviors that uphold purity (whereas trait anger and trait fear did not have the same predictive effects; Horberg, Oveis, Keltner, & Cohen, 2009, Study 3). Regarding the moral foundation of purity, disgust-sensitive people were more likely to ascribe intentionality to an agent whose behavior had the side effect of causing gay men to kiss in public (Inbar, Pizarro, Knobe, & Bloom, 2009, Study 1) and showed more unfavorable automatic associations with gay people (vs. heterosexuals; Study 2). Stronger moral condemnation of suicide was also predicted by higher disgust sensitivity, as were more intense disgust responses to obituaries, stronger beliefs that suicide taints the victims’ souls, and greater concerns about the moral foundation of purity (Rottman et al., 2014). The predictive effects of disgust sensitivity, however, are not limited to the moral foundation of purity or to moral violations that involve physical disgust (e.g., sexual immorality, bloody murder). Higher disgust sensitivity also predicted stronger condemnation of moral transgressions that go beyond the purity domain and involve no disgust and higher likelihoods of moralizing violations of social conventions (Chapman & Anderson, 2014). Sensitivity to Cleanliness or Bodily Experience and Moral Judgment Excessive cleaning due to fear of contamination is the most common symptom of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD; National Institute of Mental Health, 2016). Accordingly, people with OCD show particularly strong cleanliness effects: After people described a past unethical behavior, having (vs. not having) an antiseptic wipe to use decreased their feelings of disgust, regret, guilt, shame, embarrassment, and anger, and their tendency to volunteer; these effects were stronger among people with OCD than people without OCD (Reuven, Liberman &
19 Dar, 2014). Cleanliness is a bodily experience, and people higher on private body consciousness (PBC) are more attentive to their internal bodily experiences (Miller, Murphy, & Buss, 1981). Accordingly, people high on PBC show particularly strong cleanliness-related effects: People who sat in a physically disgusting (vs. clean) room (Schnall, Haidt, et al., 2008, Study 2), wrote about a physically disgusting experience (vs. skipped this task; Study 3), or watched a physically disgusting (vs. sad, or vs. neutral) film clip (Study 4) judged moral transgressions as more wrong, regardless of whether the transgressions themselves evoked disgust or not; these effects were limited to people high on PBC and not observed among people low on PBC. Faith in Intuition and Moral Judgment In the eyes of moral rationalists (e.g., Kohlberg, 1969), moral judgment ought to be based on abstract reasoning, not tethered to irrelevant bodily experiences like being dirty and disgusted or feeling clean and pure. But as is obvious from the reviewed studies, people are susceptible to influence from incidental feelings. Does it follow that clean-moral effects are stronger among people who trust their gut feelings? On the one hand, there is evidence that after people imagined writing a deceitful (vs. an apologetic) email, their willingness to pay for hand-cleaning products (but not office supplies or general body care products) increased with their faith in intuition, even controlling for their positive and negative affect (Ward & King, 2015, Study 1). On the other hand, even professional philosophers, who supposedly rely less on intuition and gut feeling but more on reflection and logical thinking, are susceptible to the influence of cleanliness: Philosophers who completed surveys sprayed with clean scents (vs. odorless water) in a space sprayed with clean scents (vs. odorless water) judged behaviors that violate the moral foundation of purity to be less wrong from an observer’s perspective (Tobia, Chapman, & Stitch, 2013).
20 These findings raise more questions than they answer. They highlight the need to investigate whether and how clean-moral effects interact with fast vs. slow mental processes (Kahneman, 2011), what affective and cognitive mechanisms underlie them, and when and for whom they are strongest. Summary Compatible with the embodied grounding of morality in cleanliness, moral judgments and cleanliness effects are stronger for people sensitive to disgust, cleanliness, or bodily experience. Investigating whether clean-moral effects are driven by feelings-as-information (Schwarz, 2012) or also by other processes will allow clearer predictions about their personal and situational moderators. Specificity vs. Generality of the Link between Cleanliness and Morality Are clean-moral effects specific to a particular kind of morality? One view holds that different basic emotions are mapped onto different moral foundations. From this perspective, disgust is the primary emotional response to violations of the moral foundation that has been variously referred to as divinity, purity, or sanctity (Rozin, Lowery, Imada, & Haidt, 1999). But the strength of the original evidence for this claim has undergone serious questioning (see Chapman & Anderson, 2013, for details). In addition, multiple lines of counterevidence have emerged, casting doubt on the specific mapping view. For example, facial expressions of disgust can be evoked by violations of moral codes that are unrelated to divinity/purity/sanctity, like fairness (Cannon, Schnall, & White, 2011; Chapman, Kim, Susskind, & Anderson, 2009). Similarly, incidental manipulations of distaste (Eskine, Kacinik, & Prinz, 2011) and disgust (Cheng, Ottati, & Price, 2013; Schnall, Haidt et al., 2008; Wheatley & Haidt, 2005) influence moral judgments that are unrelated to divinity/purity/sanctity; and higher disgust sensitivity
21 predicts harsher condemnation of moral transgressions beyond the divinity/purity/sanctity foundation (Chapman & Anderson, 2014). These findings suggest that moral disgust is more general than initially thought. The picture is further complicated by evidence for the pervasive role of anger in morality. Anger is the predominant emotional response to moral transgressions that involve no physically disgusting elements or, as some theorists argue, to moral transgressions in general, “irrespective of the normative content involved” (Royzman, Atanasov, Landy, Parks, & Gepty, 2014, p. 892). Consistent with this view, anger is evoked by violations of many sacred values, including divinity/purity/sanctity violations (Tetlock et al., 2000). When people are asked to choose between prototypically angry or disgusted behaviors in response to divinity/purity/sanctity violations (e.g., disrespecting the Bible), they choose prototypically angry rather than disgusted behaviors (Royzman et al., 2014). Indeed, anger results in harsher judgments of both divinity/purity/sanctity and fairness violations (Cheng et al., 2013). Anger and disgust effects are sometimes confounded or co-occurring. For example, both anger and disgust influence judgments of harm (Ugazio, Lamm, & Singer, 2012); both anger and disgust can be evoked by both harm and divinity/purity/sanctity violations (Cameron, Lindquist, & Gray, 2015). Table 1 provides an organized summary of the relevant findings (for full coverage of their details, see Giner-Sorolla & Sabo, this volume).
Table 1. Emotional responses to disgusting and immoral stimuli. Stimuli Distaste stimuli (e.g., bitterness) Physically disgusting stimuli (e.g., feces) Moral violations of divinity/purity/sanctity that involve or imply physically disgusting stimuli (e.g., incest)
Response Disgust output Disgust output Disgust output, but it may have nothing to do with the acts’ immoral nature (Rozin, Haidt, & McCauley, 2008)
22 Moral violations of divinity/purity/sanctity Disgust output can occur, but (1) whether it results that do not involve or imply any physically from the same appraisals as to physically disgusting disgusting stimuli (e.g., idolatry) stimuli is unclear and (2) whether disgust is the predominant emotion is unclear because there is evidence for disgust (Chapman & Anderson, 2013) or anger (Royzman et al., 2014) as the predominant emotion Moral violations of fairness that do not Disgust output can occur, but the same caveats as involve or imply any physically disgusting above apply stimuli (e.g., biased resource allocation) Moral violations of care, loyalty, and Disgust output can occur, but anger seems to be the authority that do not involve or imply any predominant emotional response physically disgusting stimuli (e.g., intentional harm, betrayal, disrespect) In short, there appears to be a multiplicity of relations between emotions and moral foundations. Why is it so? One possible reason is that the supposedly singular foundation of divinity/purity/sanctity, as is perhaps noticeable from its unwieldy plurality, is anything but singular. Theorists have pointed out that measures of this foundation are fraught with confounds and need to be, for lack of a better verb, “purified” such that they tease apart its multiple facets and measure them more precisely (Pizarro, 2016; see also the debate among Frimer, Gray, Haidt, and Pizarro at SPSP 2016). Pending such finer-grained measures, maybe we will see a specific mapping between a particular emotion and a particular facet of divinity/purity/sanctity. Another possible reason is that all moral foundations share a common, deeper cognitive template that tracks an agent’s intentional harm on a patient (Gray, Young, & Waytz, 2012). From this perspective, what appear to be different moral foundations are really different manifestations of the same underlying process. This dovetails a constructionist view on the fluid, context-sensitive links between emotion and morality (Cameron et al., 2015), hence the apparent multiplicity in their relations. The debate continues. But whether one sees disgust as specifically tied to one moral
23 foundation or as generally related to multiple moral foundations, both sides of the debate have focused on the role of disgust, cleanliness, and purity within the realm of morality. Is cleanliness only related to moral issues?
Beyond Morality: Defense Against Threats An emerging stream of research shows that beyond its metaphorical associations with morality, a sense of cleanliness reduces the residual influence of recent negative and positive experiences, even if they have nothing to do with morality. We first review cleanliness effects on threatening experiences, then on positive experiences, and finally propose an integrative mechanism. A Threat to the Rational Self After people make a free choice between similarly attractive options, they often experience postdecisional dissonance (“Did I make the right decision?”), which is a threat to their rational self. It motivates people to justify their choice by developing a stronger preference for the chosen over the rejected option (Brehm, 1956; Festinger, 1957). This classic “spreading of alternatives” effect disappears once people wash or wipe their hands clean. After choosing between two similarly attractive music albums, people tended to rank the chosen album as better than the rejected album, but this tendency was eliminated once they had used (vs. examined) a bottle of hand soap (Lee & Schwarz, 2010b, Study 1). Likewise, after choosing between two fruit jams, people tended to expect the chosen jam to taste better than the rejected jam, but this tendency was eliminated once they had used (vs. examined) an antiseptic wipe (Study 2). An extended replication (Marotta & Bohner, 2013) showed that the ability to wipe off cognitive dissonance was independent of people’s trait preference for consistency. It also showed
24 that using substances that lack a cleansing quality (a sticky chocolate rub) did not attenuate dissonance. Finally, cleaning one’s hands was insufficient to reduce dissonance among people high on brooding tendencies, intolerance of uncertainty, and generalized anxiety, but it reliably eliminated dissonance among people low on these attributes (De Los Reyes et al., 2012). A Threat to the Competent or Secure Self Failures often lead people to feel less optimistic about their future performance and to put in compensatory effort. Wiping off one’s failure is counterproductive under these conditions. People who washed (vs. did not wash) their hands after failing a first anagram task showed more optimistic expectations about their future performance on a second anagram task—but their actual performance deteriorated, presumably through reduced effort (Kaspar, 2012). Various cleansing effects—on the competent self, the rational self, and the moral self— converge to suggest that a sense of cleanliness may be effective for reducing residual distress from threats to any facet of the self (Millet, van der Wal, Grinstein, & Lee, 2016). Consistent with this possibility, after watching a tension-inducing video clip of a physically threatening scene, people who watched another video clip involving hand-washing (vs. circle-drawing, or vs. egg-peeling) reported less tension (Study 1). Compatible effects emerged in the context of an economic threat. People who watched a video about ongoing recession and described the process of job search in times of high unemployment (vs. watched a video about oceanic nature and described the process of doing laundry) evaluated cleaning but not non-cleaning products more favorably (Study 2). The effect vanished once people affirmed values core to the self, consistent with the hypothesis that a sense of cleanliness serves to protect the self from threats, unless it is already protected (e.g., by self-affirmation). Summary
25 A sense of cleanliness helps people cope with distress from threats to different facets of the self. Following this reasoning, preliminary evidence shows that cleanliness effects are weaker after self-affirmation. Whether cleanliness serves similar protective functions as self-affirmation (D. Sherman & Cohen, 2006) in the face of all self-threats remains to be explored.
Beyond Morality: Clean-Slate Effects All of the studies reviewed so far examined cleanliness effects on threatening experiences, dovetailing Douglas’s (1966) interest in the symbolic meanings of cleanliness and purity in contexts of danger and order maintenance. Yet there is evidence for cleanliness effects on positive, non-threatening experiences as well. Cleansing appears to wipe the mental slate clean. It exerts valence-general effects on diverse domains such as luck, endowment, and goals. Luck Not surprisingly, people are more willing to take risks when they think it is their lucky rather than unlucky day. For example, Canadian business students who had to recall a good financial decision took more risk on a subsequent financial decision task than people who had to recall a bad financial decision. However, cleaning their hands with an antiseptic wipe (vs. merely examining it) attenuated the influence of both kinds of recall. After wiping, those who had thought about a good decision took less risk, whereas those who had thought about a bad decision took more risk (Xu, Zwick, & Schwarz, 2012, Study 1). In a related study, Hong Kong students played a gambling task in which they had good or bad luck. Subsequently, they were offered the opportunity to play an additional round with their own money. Those who had experienced a winning streak invested more of their money than those who had experienced a losing streak. However, washing their hands eliminated the
26 influence of their previous good or bad luck such that winners and losers no longer differed in how much money they bet (Study 2). Similarly, people who had good luck in four rounds of a color-guessing game were less likely to want to play the game again after washing their hands (Moscatiello & Nagel, 2014, Studies 1 & 2). In contrast, those who had bad luck were more likely to play the game again after washing (Study 2). Across these studies, participants acted as if good or bad luck left a physical trace that could be wiped off, limiting the impact of one’s luck on future outcomes. Endowment When people sell a product, they ask for more money than they would be willing to spend to acquire the product (Kahneman, Knetsch, & Thaler, 1991). This so-called endowment effect appears to be eliminated through physical cleansing. People who washed their hands (vs. evaluated a liquid soap) were more likely to exchange a previously endowed chocolate bar for a different one (Florack et al., 2014, Study 2). Similarly, people who washed their hands (vs. had their height measured) were more likely to exchange a previously endowed drink for a different one (Study 1), reported better mood, and evaluated both drinks as more positive (but not negative or acceptable; Study 3). Goals Cleansing has also been found to change basic goal priming effects. After unscrambling sentences containing words related to the goal of academic achievement, people who used (vs. examined) an antiseptic wipe completed fewer word fragments about the primed goal (academic achievement) but more word fragments about a conflicting goal (socializing), whereas their completions pertaining to an unrelated goal (kindness) remained unaffected (Dong & Lee, 2016, Study 1). This pattern suggests that cleansing can reduce the accessibility of the goal that is
27 active at the time of cleansing. Because accessible goals guide behavior, cleansing’s effect on accessibility can also influence active goal pursuit. After unscrambling sentences containing words related to the goal of being healthy, people who used (vs. examined) an antiseptic wipe were less likely to choose a healthy granola bar over an unhealthy chocolate bar (Study 2). But if people unscrambled sentences containing neutral words (i.e., words not priming a health goal), using (vs. examining) an antiseptic wipe did not influence their snack choices. Finally, active goals suppress competing goals. If cleansing reduces the accessibility of an active goal, it may wipe the slate clean for subsequent goals to exert stronger influence. Indeed, in addition to diminishing effects of goals primed beforehand, cleansing amplifies effects of goals primed afterwards. If people unscrambled sentences containing words related to one goal (e.g., health) before a cleansing manipulation and also unscrambled sentences containing words related to another goal (e.g., saving) after the cleansing manipulation, then using (vs. examining) an antiseptic wipe decreased people’s judged importance of the previously primed goal and increased their judged importance of the subsequently primed goal, whatever the goal contents were (Study 3). This contrastive pattern completely vanished once another manipulation had psychologically separated a primed goal from the present self (Study 4). By the logic of moderation of process (Spencer, Zannna, & Fong, 2005), these findings suggest that cleansing is functionally similar to a procedure of psychological separation. Summary Cleansing reduces the influence of recent prior experience, be it negative (e.g., guilt from immoral behavior, dissonance from free choice, pessimism from academic failure, tension from physical threat, risk aversion from bad luck) or positive (e.g., moral behavior, good luck, product
28 endowment, primed goals). Cleansing seems to amplify the influence of subsequent experience (e.g., a new goal) as well. Just how broad are clean-slate effects? They appear valence- and content-general. We have yet to find domains where cleansing does not exert any influence. To identify the boundary of clean-slate effects, we need to understand the underlying mechanism. Physical Cleansing as an Embodied Procedure of Psychological Separation Because cleanliness effects extend far beyond the moral realm, the embodied metaphor of moral cleanliness (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999; Landau, Meier, & Keefer, 2010; Williams, Huang, & Bargh, 2009) cannot be the only mechanism at work. After all, it can only predict clean-moral effects, but not the full range of clean-slate effects. We propose that physical cleansing functions as an embodied procedure of psychological separation (Dong & Lee, 2016). By separating physical traces from a physical target object (e.g., detaching dirt from hands), physical cleansing serves as the embodied grounding for the separation of psychological traces from a psychological target object (e.g., dissociating goals from the self). As a procedure, separation is content-neutral and applicable across domains, hence the valence- and domain-general nature of clean-slate effects. Psychological separation, by marking what belongs to a category and what does not, may even be such a basic component of cognitive processing that it serves as a deeper basis of the supposedly “basic metaphor” (Schnall, 2014) of moral cleanliness. What sorts of psychological separation may be conferred by a sense of cleanliness? Psychological research in several areas can shed some light on different processes that may underlie cleansing and that predict different boundary conditions of clean-slate effects. For example, does cleansing work by affectively neutralizing prior experiences? This speculation is compatible with the observation that washing behaviors appear to trigger termination signals in
29 the security motivational system (Szechtman & Woody, 2004). It is also compatible with studies in which cleansing reduces the impact of affective (emotional or motivational) experiences, such as guilt, dissonance, failure, luck, or goal pursuit. If true, this account predicts that cleansing effects should be limited to affective experiences and should not extend to non-affective domains (e.g., declarative memory). Another possibility is that cleansing exerts its influence by distancing one’s prior experience from one’s present self. Based on research showing that self-distancing enhances reappraisals of affective experiences (Kross, Ayduk, & Mischel, 2005) and that greater psychological distance leads to more abstract construal (Trope & Liberman, 2003, 2010), we expect that if cleansing works through a distancing process, it should enhance not just reappraisals of affective experiences, but also abstract construals of both affective and nonaffective experiences. Digging deeper, if cleansing does promote distancing, how does it do so? By functioning as a temporal marker that separates the past from the present (for research on temporal markers, see Dai, Milkman, & Riis, 2015; Zauberman, Levav, Diehl, & Bhargave, 2009)? If so, clean-slate effects should be mediated by temporal distancing and one may expect that cleansing reduces the accessibility, clarity, vividness, and concreteness of mental representations of past events. One may also expect that cleansing changes the construal of past events such that they seem less spatially near, less socially related, and less causally linked to the present self. Or does physical cleansing work by imposing a category boundary that excludes a prior experience from the construal of the present reality such that people use the former as a standard for evaluating the latter (Schwarz & Bless, 1992)? If so, clean-slate effects would be mediated by a comparative process of subjective construal, which should influence not just the accessibility,
30 but also the relevance and use of information. These deeper mechanisms, their relative contributions, and the boundary conditions they predict await empirical testing. Teasing them apart will reveal the underpinnings of cleansing as an embodied procedure of psychological separation. It may provide insights into why cleanliness and purification are linked to taboo and dangerous things from which we want to separate ourselves as Douglas (1966) observed in her pioneering work. It may also shed light on medical practitioners’ common failure to wash their hands (Pittet et al., 2004), thereby pointing to more effective psychological approaches to nudging this behavioral problem (Griffing, 2012) and reducing health risks in society.
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