Influence Of Physical Cleansing On Einstulling Effect

It has been extensively documented that physical cleansing can reduce or eliminate the influence of prior experience.For example,cleansing one’s hands(or face)with an antiseptic wipe reduces one’s guilt from past immoral deed and one’s tendency to engage in compensatory prosocial behavior;cleansing one’s hands with an antiseptic wipe(or washing one’s hands)eliminates postdecisional dissonance,etc.Such effects is collectively referred to as “clean-slate effects”.The researchers have proposed that the psychological mechanism underlying this effect is that cleansing functions as an embodied/grounded procedure of psychological separation.That is,by separating physical traces(e.g.,dirt)from a physical target object(e.g.,hands),cleansing serves to separate psychological traces(e.g.,previous immoral experiences)from psychological target object(e.g.,current self).According to this assumption,Physical cleansing should reduce or eliminate not just the effects of affective(emotional or motivational)experience,but also the effects of non-affective(e.g.,thinking).However,so far the research on cleansing effects has involved past experience related to emotion or motivation,all of which were affective experience.Therefore,whether physical cleansing can reduce or eliminate the effect of thinking experience remains to be tested.For that reason,the currents study examines whether physical cleansing can reduce the effect of mental set in the field of problem solving.The exploration of this problem will provide strong evidence for the hypothesis of psychological separation embodied process of physical cleansing and help to clarify the internal mechanism of cleansing effects.At the same time,it will also provide new thought for the cultivation of creative thinking.The present study conducted three experiments.Experiment 1 and 2 are both One-factor(cleansing vs.not cleansing)betweenparticipants design,respectively adopted Luchins’ Water jar task(Experiment 1)and self-created idiom maze task(Experiment 2)to form and detect set,to investigate whether physical cleansing could reduce the influence of non-affective experience of mental set on subsequent problem solving.In both experiments,all the participants initially solved six problems which could be solved by the same method to develop the mental set,followed by the physical cleansing manipulation(cleansing vs.not cleansing.In Experiment 1,the participants in the cleansing condition took a sanitizing wipe of their hands,and the participants in the not cleansing condition examined the wipe instead of actually using it;In Experiment 2,the participants in the cleansing condition watched a washing-hands video,and the participants in the not cleansing condition watched an examining-pens video).Finally,participants continued to work on five problems to detect mental set,Problems 1-4 are used to calculate the set score,problem 5 to calculate the time.The higher score represented higher Einstellung effect,the shorter time represented a faster rate of breaking the set.The results of both experiments showed that physical cleansing can reduce Einstulling effect.Specifically,either Water jar task(Experiment 1)or theself-created idiom maze task(Experiment 2),either directly physical cleansing(Experiment 1)or watching a video of someone else cleansing(Experiment 2),the set score and problem solving time of the participants in the cleansing condition were significantly lower than those in the not cleansing condition,indicating that the participants in the cleansing condition were less affected by the previous mental set.The results showed that the participants in the cleansing condition were less influenced by their previous mental set.In Experiment 3,a 2(physical cleansing: cleansing vs.not cleansing)× 2(task separation: separate,not separate)between-participants design was adopted.On the basis of the above experimental procedure,task separation,which psychologically separates the past from the present,was introduced to investigate the psychological mechanism of physical cleansing influencing the Einstulling effect.That is,in the influence of physical cleansing on Einstulling effect,whether physical cleansing plays a role of psychological separation.The results showed that there was an interaction effect between physical cleansing and task separation.Specifically,in the not cleansing condition,the set score and problem solving time of the participants in the task separation condition were significantly lower than that of those in the not task separation condition;in the cleansing condition,there was no significant difference in set score and problem solving time between the participants in the task separation condition and the not task separation.This interaction effect suggested that task separation plays a role of psychological separation in not cleansing condition,reducing the Einstulling effect;and that in the cleansing condition,because physical cleansing plays the role of psychological separation,the Einstulling effect is reduced after cleaning,regardless of whether the task is separated or not,resulting in no significant difference in the Einstulling effect between the condition of separation and not separation.Based on the above research results,the mainly conclusions were as follows:(1)Physical cleansing can reduce the influence of mental set on subsequent problem solving(Einstulling effect).(2)In the influence of physical cleansing on Einstulling effece,physical cleansing plays the role of psychological separation.That is,physical cleansing as an embodied separation procedure,by physical separation,plays the role of separating the past and the current state psychologically and reducing the Einstulling effect.