Clean Body, Clean Mind?

Social Science research at its worst. This kind of study draws dubious causal links based on hand-crafted statistics. With the right survey (which the researchers build themselves), you can show a statistically significant relationship between just about any two things.
Take any survey done only with college students--usually students at the researcher's university, often participating in the study for extra credit--with a grain of salt.

Ned
You might have noticed my absence as of late. It's not your column's (which I enjoy reading) but this sites Active X scripts which lock up my browser. So I come here less often (I need to run high security). How about putting in a word to the sponsers to clean up their act?

Note from Ned--

Hmmm, Quietman. Sorry to hear about that. I'll tell our production folks.

Thanks Ned

Quietman -

Certain ads on this site (one unfailingly) either make my browser crash or make the cursor flicker. Refreshing replaces the ad with a new one, so you might try that.

Ned, thank you for this piece. I find social psych fascinating.

It occurs to me that it might not be the feeling or thought of cleanliness per se that made the difference, but its context.

The students were told to wash their hands "because the room was used by the faculty and needed to be kept extra clean." It would seem likely that this request would cast the person(s) conducting the experiment, who are perceived authority figures, as thoughtful, careful, and respectful. That, in turn, would make the students feel as if it's a safe environment, which could alter their perception of how wrong anything shown to them in that setting might be.

The words associated with cleanliness might have a similar subliminal effect. The scrambled sentences would probably become associated at least subconsciously with the setting and the researcher(s). Again, that would make the environment feel safer and more wholesome.

It would be interesting to see what would happen if the people administering the questions about moral dilemmas came into the room only for that purpose, without the students' having seen them before, so they are not associated with handwashing or words connoting cleanliness -- and to change nothing else. My guess would be that the difference between the "clean" group and the control group might be far less significant.

I should know better than to hope to express myself clearly so late at night. I think my last paragraph above is ambiguous.

What I meant was for there to be one person or persons requesting that subjects wash their hands or giving the scrambled sentences -- and then a changing of the guard, and a new person coming in to present the moral dilemmas.

Of course, one shouldn't forget the age-old line about "washing one's hands of the whole matter."

Ned & Jill
Well whatever it was, it's better now.
Jill, interesting comment BTW.

Well I spoke too soon. Just got the active X controls message when I posted that comment. It was not doing that last night.

Andyr, while I was fiddling around with controlling for other factors, I think you cut straight through to the heart of it. :-) Age-old lines only become age-old lines if they speak to something primal in us.

Come to think of it, the whole Lady Macbeth sleepwalking scene revolves around this very concept.

Now I want to go in search of an anthropologist who can tell us whether the same idea is reflected in the written and spoken language of widely divergent cultures. That would probably tell us more about whether it's cultural or innate than further experiments would.

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Quietman, sorry it happened again. When you get the active x message, is your browser frozen, or can you still refresh? I'm willing to bet that when you posted, the ad on the new page was different and was the culprit. :-(

Jill, The line goes back to Biblical times, if not before that. Isn't that what Herod said of the "Jesus problem?" Come to think of it, many politicians have used the concept, too, in their dealings with social and political problems. It must be innate.

"more prepared to accept injustices and wrongdoing"

Jill
browser frozen, OK button in message non-responsive but sometimes frees up after a minute or two otherwise I bring up Task Manager and force the browser closed.
I don't know about the Ads, I will try to pay attention next time.

Yes - the banner ad changed.

Hey, Andy :-)

You're absolutely right, of course, that the idea of purifying with water goes back to biblical times. Apart from Christian baptism, both Jewish and Islamic law call for ritual baths under prescribed circumstances to regain spiritual purity. (Among Jews, it's mostly only Orthodox Jews who adhere to the practice now.)

So I'd expect any culture heavily influenced by the three Abrahamic religions to contain this idea even in a secular context. I'd expect language about washing away guilt or sin to be part of the literature and part of the spoken language in the form of idioms like "wash your hands of it."

I was actually wondering, though, if we'd find the same kind of idiom and literary theme (either written or in oral storytelling) in more isolated cultures -- tribal cultures in the Americas, Pacific islanders, parts of Asia and Africa not touched by our traditions and modern global culture. I think that's how we'd be able to distinguish between cultural and innate through the use of language.

Someone, somewhere, must have documented this idea. If not, I want to go out and do it!

In terms of the experiment itself, it still strikes me that they weren't controlling for how the people giving the questions were perceived. I also find myself wondering what effect it would have had if the moral dilemmas were presented with "time to think about them" -before- the handwashing or scrambled sentences. The difference could have been even more dramatic, although you'd have to make sure the control group had the same delay before answering, and probably control for interaction with other people and ambient sights and sounds during that interval.

Quietman, you mentioned that you have to run high security. Would it compromise anything, though, if you installed a different browser (Mozilla or Safari or whatever is different from what you currenty use), make the settings on that lower, and use it -only- for this site? The ads are annoying, but I can't imagine that any of the scripts are malicious. Just a thought.

Jill, Since water has been around for so long, and since it's so necessary for human life, it must be an integrated part of all cultures, in one way or another. Since humans have been around so long, I'm sure that water has worked its way into almost all cultures as some sort of iconic substance. This is particularly true in many religions, for baptism, blessings, etc. Then, there's the mysticism of the sea...

Andy, without question water is revered in every culture, since without it there's no life. I think all life, human and otherwise, has an innate understanding of its importance.

Going back to the study done at Plymouth University, though, we see what to me, at least, is an unexpected finding: that the act of washing one's hands, or even the thought of physical cleanliness, can actually offset moral repugnance. I find it hard to imagine that washing my hands would make it seem any more acceptable to violate a kitten in some unspeakable way for sexual pleasure (or for any reason). And yet, the study showed significantly more tolerance for just that among the handwashing group than among the control group. So the question we return to is whether we're culturally/religiously/ritually conditioned to feel as if physical washing heals us morally, or whether we're born with that response.

I think we'd have to look very closely at other cultures to find the answer.

There's some sort of psychological disorder that causes sufferers to wash their hands continuously. I don't know if it has to do with guilt or a feeling of being "unclean" in some way, or both. I would assume that this is a pan-cultural problem, since it's an individual affliction. Or have I strayed from the path?