A clean self can render harsh moral judgment

Zhong, Chen-Bo; Strejcek, Brendan; Sivanathan, Niro

doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2010.04.003

Cited by 187 publications

(166 citation statements)

References 16 publications

(15 reference statements)

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“…Correspondingly, activating the concept of physical purity can affect the evaluation of immoral social issues. For example, Zhong, Strejcek, and Sivanathan (2010) found harsher judgments about immoral social issues after participants had washed their hands. Also, Kaspar and Klane (2016) found that hand cleansing led to harsher moral judgments about politicians who allegedly committed a misconduct.…”

Section: The Link Between Physical and Moral Puritymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Indeed, Zhong et al (2010) found that the activation of cleanliness cognitions was accompanied by an inflated moral self-image that, in turn, licenced harsher judgments about immoral social issues 1 . Research in the field of emotions also supports the idea that being in a positive state (similar to the feeling of being morally clean) can bias information processing in favor of negative information: Schwager and Rothermund (2013) found an attentional preference for emotional stimuli that were opposite in valence to the current emotional state of the observer.…”

Section: Physical Cleansing and Information Processingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This finding suggests a decreased (instead of an increased) sensitivity towards negative (immoral) information as such information may lose its threatening potential in light of an inflated moral self-image elicited by physical cleansing (Zhong et al, 2010). Moreover, the feelings-as-information framework by Schwarz (1990) suggests that being in a positive mood state may reduce one's motivation to explore the environment with respect to threatening cues due to an increased feeling of safety.…”

Section: Physical Cleansing and Information Processingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The former group applied the hand cleansing treatment before the learning phase of the memory test, while the latter group cleansed their hands afterwards (but before the retrieval phase). A third group of 25 subjects formed the "control group" and did not cleanse their hands in accordance with previous studies (e.g., Zhong & Liljenquist, 2006;Zhong et al, 2010, Kaspar, 2013a. All participants were presented the same set of moral and immoral items, leading to a 3 (between-subject factor: group) × 2 (within-subject factor: target valence) mixed between-within design.…”

Section: Participants and Study Designmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Physical Cleansing Biases Recognition Performance for (Im)moral Social Issues

Kaspar

Jahn²

2016

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Previous research showed that physical cleansing can affect moral judgements, indicating a functional link between the concepts of physical and moral purity. The act of cleansing one's own hands was also found to influence cognitive processes beyond the moral domain. Overall, research suggests that physical cleansing can bias cognitive information processing. To investigate this assumption, we extended the hitherto scope in this research line and examined cleanliness effects on memory performance. For the first time, we scrutinized the effect of hand cleansing on the recall and recognition performance for (im)moral social issues. We found that cleansing produced a significant increase in participants' memory for immoral versus moral social issues at the level of recognition performance, whereas free recall was not affected. This negativity bias occurred independently of whether cleansing was performed before or after the learning phase, indicating that cleansing has an effect on the retrieval of information from memory.

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Section: The Link Between Physical and Moral Puritymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Physical Cleansing and Information Processingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Physical Cleansing and Information Processingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Participants and Study Designmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Physical Cleansing Biases Recognition Performance for (Im)moral Social Issues

Kaspar

Jahn²

2016

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“…My sense of moral 'oughtness' may be only a conditioned reflex induced like 'feeling clean' by habitual routine (Zhong et al, 2010), but were that so the grounds for any moral or religious belief, along with any distinctively human meaning would disappear. The conviction that ethics matter involves just as much an act of faith and belief for the secular humanist as it does for the religious believer.…”

Section: Act Five: My Moral Learningmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Doing God’ in ethics and education: a play in five acts

Gates

2011

Journal of Moral Education

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Usage of any items from the University of Cumbria's institutional repository 'Insight' must conform to the following fair usage guidelines.Any item and its associated metadata held in the University of Cumbria's institutional repository Insight (unless stated otherwise on the metadata record) may be copied, displayed or performed, and stored in line with the JISC fair dealing guidelines (available here) for educational and not-for-profit activities provided that• the authors, title and full bibliographic details of the item are cited clearly when any part of the work is referred to verbally or in the written form • a hyperlink/URL to the original Insight record of that item is included in any citations of the work• the content is not changed in any way• all files required for usage of the item are kept together with the main item file. You may not• sell any part of an item• refer to any part of an item without citation • amend any item or contextualise it in a way that will impugn the creator's reputation• remove or alter the copyright statement on an item.The full policy can be found here. Alternatively contact the University of Cumbria Repository Editor by emailing insight@cumbria.ac.uk.

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Organic defaults in online‐shopping: Immediate effects but no spillover to similar choices

Kuhn

Ihmels

Kutzner

2020

J of Consumer Behaviour

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Changing defaults—the preselection that becomes effective without active choice—is becoming a prominent policy tool, after having been proven to be effective in areas as varied as retirement savings, organ donation and product customization. Yet, little is known about how default effects spill over to subsequent similar behaviors. In an online shopping scenario, we found standard default effects on the share of organically produced products in the overall selection of products. These effects did not spill over to subsequent active shopping choices. This was true for defaults that were hard and easy to change (Exp. 1, N = 90), for immediate and delayed subsequent choices (Exp. 2, N = 106) and for self‐selected defaults (Exp. 3, N = 181). These findings suggest that the reach and scalability of default manipulations in policy making may be limited, but also speak against the possibility for negative spillover.

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A clean self can render harsh moral judgment

Cited by 187 publications

References 16 publications

Physical Cleansing Biases Recognition Performance for (Im)moral Social Issues

Physical Cleansing Biases Recognition Performance for (Im)moral Social Issues

‘Doing God’ in ethics and education: a play in five acts

Organic defaults in online‐shopping: Immediate effects but no spillover to similar choices

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