Effect Of Cleanliness On Moral Judgments

Embodied morality refers to the opinion that moral cognition and behaviors are dependent on special physical experiences and environment, and it also attaches great importance to the interactive impact between them. When discussing about embodiment in morality, many researchers focus their studies on the relationship among physical cleanliness with moral judgment and moral behaviors. Researchers have already confirmed that washing behavior can not only remove physical dirt, it can also wash away the emotion like guilt or shame, so as to have a different impact on the direction to moral judgment and behavior. Researchers further called this phenomenon as wiping the slate clean.However, there have been heated debate on the direction to which physical cleansing will lead while making moral judgments, namely more severely or even more tolerably? After referring to some related researches, there are some factors people have paid few attention to like the original mental states(mood) before cleansing priming, the source or attribution of physical cleanliness, the roles people play(actor or observer) in moral judgments, the type of moral behaviors, as well as some unknowable moderators and mediators, and all these factors could exert some distinct influences on our moral judgments. Based on these potential influential factors, the present research focuses on the emotion states like happiness, relax, or disgust before physical cleanliness in Experiment 1, aiming to explore whether physical cleansing can decrease a present feeling like disgust or happiness on moral judgments,thus having an impact on judgment-making. Experiment 2 is divided into two sub-experiments and is included in variables like priming source of cleanliness,the roles(actor or observer) in immoral behaviors and the type of moral scenarios.The results are as follows:1. The priming of physical cleanliness can wash away disgust, so as to have a significant impact on emotional differences in the time course, but cleansing priming can't remove emotions like relax and happiness; Compared to relax and happiness,when participants are in disgust, they have more cleanliness arousal and less demand for wet wipes in production rating task. Disgust plays as mediating role betweencleansing priming and moral judgment.2. When participants receive the priming of self-cleanliness, they make harsh moral judgments no matter the roles(actor or observer) participants play in immoral behaviors; and when putting the attribution of cleanliness to others, feelings of other-cleanliness could lead to less harshness about others.