| The Metaphor of "cleanliness is close to virtue" widely exists in the fields of culture and religion.Many empirical studies in recent years have shown that physical cleanliness can wash the guilt away and increase unethical behavior,however,other researchers have taken a different approach to obtain different results,and even some conclusions are completely opposite,which may be caused by differences in experimental methods,experimental materials and control variables.Early studies have focused on physical cleanliness(washing hands,bathing,for example),so how does the concept of cleanliness affect cheating? In addition,this kind of research is mostly in the West.Whether the metaphor of cleanliness and moral purity has cross-cultural consistency is worthy of confirmation in Chinese cultural background.Therefore,under the background of Chinese Culture,this study explores the influence of clean self-concept priming on cheating behavior of high school students.In experiment 1,participants were divided into clean self,dirty self and control groups to investigate the differences of deceptive behaviors among high school students under the matrix task.The results showed that the clean self could not reduce unethical emotions such as guilt,and emotion did not act as an intermediary variable to influence cheating behavior.Participants in the clean priming group were just as likely to cheat as those in the other groups,although participants in the cleanliness group were more likely to cheat than those in the control and dirty groups.In experiment 2,we used the point estimation paradigm to investigate the difference between the dishonesty behavior of high school students under personal versus vicarious cleansing.The results showed that there was no significant difference in the rate of cheating between subjects who initiated self-cleaning and those who initiated vicarious cleansing;over time,deception increases;the cheating rate of female students is higher than that of male students.We come to the following conclusions: this study explores the relationship between clean self and deceptive behavior in the context of Chinese culture,and finds that clean condition could not repeat the results of "clean guilt",but clean self could increase the degree of deception.This conclusion supports the idea that clean priming increases unethical behavior and reflects the cross-cultural consistency of the metaphor of cleanliness and moral purity.However,there is no significant difference in the impact of deceptive behaviors based on the clean feelings of self and others.In summary,research findings on the link between cleanliness and ethics are inconsistent and need to be further validated in the future. |
