Cleanliness and Morality

Posted by Beetle B. on Sun 02 October 2016

The sense of smell impacts moral judgments. Asking participants to fill out a survey on moral scenarios in the presence of fart smell led to harsher judgments. There was a similar experiment with bitter vs sweet drinks.

When trying to decide on something, we look inward to how we feel as a heuristic.

Asking people to wash their hands prior to the survey resulted in more moralism (harsher judgments). Once clean, a person wishes to remain so. The reverse was also true: Immorality leads people to desire cleanliness. They often chose cleaning products among choices of free items to take home.

Standing near vs far from a hand sanitizer made people temporarily more conservative.

tags : trm, morality, Haidt