
Clean People Feel Morally Superior - robg
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/08/clean-people-feel-morally-superior/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wiredscience+%28Blog+-+Wired+Science%29#ixzz0xpejSPwN
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proee
The same is true for nicely dressed people.

I bought my first suit last week and walked around downtown feeling all smug -
I wasn't even trying to feel smug and yet when you're the best dressed in the
room it goes right to your head.

Lame...

~~~
zavulon
You described it in very negative terms, but I don't think it's necessarily
that way. Humans are social creatures, and can't help it but judge someone
they have no other information about based on the clothes.

If you're happy because you're dressed well, it doesn't have to mean you're
"smug" - taking care of your looks shows that you care about other people's
quality of interaction with you - everybody would rather interact with a
person dressed nicely as opposed to if the same person dressed like a bum.

Also, there's something to be said about a confidence boost that you get
knowing you're looking well kept. Most geeks will happily ignore all these
points, but I think that's a mistake.

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proee
I agree that dressing nicely is a good way to communicate that you're serious
about interacting with others.

You certainly don't want to come across as unprofessional and it's important
to show others that you're putting forth your best effort (including
appearance) for the work at hand.

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spaceman77
On a slightly related note I used to maintain highly manicured gardens for
people in wealthy neighborhoods. A lot of these people were anal-retentive
WASP's that scowled from their high perch as they surveyed a neighbors over-
grown garden. They especially liked my leaf-blower because I could get all
their hard surfaces perfectly clean. Many of them would also not hesitate to
let me know I missed blowing a few pine needles. That job started to make me
neurotic after a few years.

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cma
What's interesting is that it isn't a new phenomenon; Veblen wrote about our
strange lawn-care fetishism in The Theory of the Leisure Class in 1899.

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jackvalentine
Sayed Kotb also commented on it after his visit to the United States in the
1940s, considering it a vulgar preoccupation.

For all his many faults, I feel he was on to something there.

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SageRaven
Interesting, if not relevant, tangent: Modern LDS missionaries are expected to
bathe daily, without fail, when they are abroad proselytizing. I have heard
anecdotal accounts of this causing some friction with their hosts due to the
custom of daily bathing being wasteful/abnormal and/or a hardship on the local
water supply.

This article makes me wonder if this psychological effect has been known by
various religious groups for quite some time. From old-school Judeo-Christian
"laws of cleanliness" to the more modern LDS church, keeping clean may be
about self-righteousness more than sanitation.

Very interesting experiments, nonetheless.

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cgs1019
I believe the title should read "Clean Undergrads at Northwestern University
Feel Morally Superior." FTA: "Some 58 undergrads were invited to a lab filled
with spotless new equipment." I don't think this sample has any remote chance
of being representative of the "People" population.

The "clean" and "dirty" passages used in the follow up studies employ very
strong positive and negative words, respectively, and no control group seems
to have been used to compare how people make moral judgments after reading
very positive or very negative passages irrespective of cleanliness.

This is not even pop science it's trash science. It's dirty, but reading it
makes me feel more morally superior, not less, contrary to the conclusion of
the "study."

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astine
Well it is easier to get away with being a jerk when you don't smell like B.O.

The first experiment is clearly suspect. I strikes me as equally like the
people who washed their hands held themselves, and society, to a higher
standard than those who didn't and thus where harsher in theory judgments.

In the later two, I'd like to see if the result differed greatly by having
students read passages about how smart/stupid they were or how attractive/ugly
they were.

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lionhearted
This makes self-righteous dreadlocked Marxist-toting hippie activists all the
more puzzling.

~~~
j_baker
As a self-righteous slob, let me be the first to say that clean people don't
have a monopoly on smugness.

~~~
rdtsc
Honest, self critical slobs, that are able to view themselves from others'
point of view, and still make a conscious choice to be slobs are alright in my
book.

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brc
If this really is true, might there be an in-built evolutionary aspect? That
people who have an inbuilt tendency towards cleanliness have less chance of
contracting disease?

All those religious texts and 'cleanliness is next to Godliness' - surely it
can't just be a modern phenomonen? Even baptism - the act of dunking onesself
in a river - must be considered cleaning for the purposes of being superior?

Note I don't expect this to be taken seriously and I'm no theological expert,
but there is a talking point why cleaning pops up so frequently in religious
texts of all persuasions. There surely is an element of life instruction in
religious texts that drop below the moral level (do not lie) and into the
physical level (clean yourself)

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ajuc
In Polish you literaly have "clean or dirty conscience", Bible also tells much
about cleaning sbd's sins.

I'd like to see if this is about language (people primmed with concept being
close to each other in language skew their judgements), or is this universal
link between ethic and hygiene.

Maybe being clean is universaly considered good thing, but there are other
more arbitrary associations that could be checked - for example in Polish
"prawy" means "right" and also "good". Probably there are some cultures where
it's the left that is associated with high ethic standards.

These 2 cultures should skew their moral judgaments to opposite directions
when primmed with either "right" or "left".

~~~
brc
Clean conscience is also a common English phrase, though, 'dirty conscience'
isn't - but people would understand what you meant.

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wihon
Tbh, I'm not so sure about the accuracy of this study (and of 'experimental'
social psychology in general - though that's another issue altogether)...but I
guess I always new those tidy, short-haired bastards were uptight.

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mynameishere
Well maybe they are. Why bother with peoples feeling's about _x_ before
bothering about _x_ itself.

"Clean people commit less crimes." Not unthinkable.

~~~
j_baker
I'll grant you that it's not unthinkable. But I think it's highly unlikely
that there's any kind of non-spurrious correlation between cleanliness and
crime.

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hugh3
I find it just as plausible as the idea here that it makes you more morally
judgemental of others. If it makes you more judgemental of others, it might
well make you more judgemental of yourself.

I don't know if we can necessarily cut street crime by handing out free
showers to bums and thugs. Might be worth a try.

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joecode
Couldn't this be an expectation issue? Washing their hands signaled to the
subjects that they were in a more "proper" social environment. To fit in, they
may have judged the social issues more harshly.

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WingForward
Cleanliness is just a form of purity, which key value of morality.

Jonathan Haidt's work in this regard is fascinating.

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joe_the_user
On the theme of the difficulty of making definite judgement with social-
scientific experiment, I would say it's hard to separate out rather a specific
state/behavior like "cleanness". Whether it is induced or normally occurring,
it goes with a lot of broad social tendencies.

In the first phase of the experiment, it's possible that asking people to do
some other ritual-type behavior might or might not have had the same effect.

In the second phase, having people read "I am good/bad" or "I make
correct/incorrect" decisions again might or might not have had the same
effect.

Move over, while reading about cleanness and cleaning yourself seems like a
way to do this separating out, this approach relies, at the very least, on the
assumption that imagining something is comparable to experiencing it.

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j_baker
You're correct in assuming that it's difficult to extract correct conclusions
from a psychology experiment, just like with any other science. Moreso with
psychology than other fields though because humans are complex beings.

But logically speaking, how do you make psychology beneficial to society
without making a few assumptions? Math, for instance, is nothing _but_ a set
of rules built on top of assumptions. Yes, we can point out all the potential
edge-cases all day. But that won't put our society any closer to understanding
the human psyche than when we started.

Of course as an alternative, you could just accept the team's conclusions:
"Acts of cleanliness have not only the potential to shift our moral pendulum
to a more virtuous self, but also license harsher moral judgment of others."
To me, that seems like a valid conclusion to draw based on the research. Would
you not agree?

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Helianthus16
>You're correct in assuming that it's difficult to extract correct conclusions
from a psychology experiment, just like with any other science.

In psychology it is much much more difficult to tease out "correct"
conclusions than in, for example, physics. This is a result of 1) the
complicated nature of human behavior, which is not subject to (in comparison)
simple mathematical formula; and 2) the unethical nature of trying to measure
the effects of bizarre environments on children in order to analyze
development.

This is what you said right afterwards, of course.

But the fuzzy sciences face challenges that naturally make them less rigorous
in the scope of their conclusions.

