using a kitten . . . next to godliness?

[novapsyche]

Clean People Are Less Judgmental

A new study, set for publication in the December issue of the journal Psychological Science, reveals that when a person feels physically clean, he or she cuts others more moral slack.

[...] The results come from two experiments with university students. In the first one, 40 students had to complete 40 scrambled sentence tasks, each involving four words. By underlining any three words, a sentence could be formed. One group of students worked on sentences that included some "clean" words, such as "pure," "washed," "immaculate" and "pristine," while another group read neutral words.

The participants then rated a series of moral dilemmas on a scale ranging from "perfectly OK" to "extremely wrong." The dilemmas included keeping money found inside a wallet, putting false information on a resume, killing a terminally ill plane crash survivor in order to avoid starvation and using a kitten for sexual arousal.

The students who read the clean-word sentences judged such transgressions to be less wrong compared with the other students in the experiment.

In the second experiment, students watched a three-minute clip from the dark drug film Trainspotting, which had been shown to elicit feelings of disgust. Then, half of the students washed their hands while the others didn't. The students rated the same six moral vignettes as had students in the first experiment. The hand-washers gave less severe ratings to the vignettes than did those who didn't wash their hands.