Washing Away Your Sins:Threatened Morality and Physical Cleansing锆石怎么读
Chen-Bo Zhong 1*and Katie Liljenquist 2
Physical cleansing has been a focal element in religious ceremonies for thousands of years.The prevalence of this practice suggests a psychological association between bodily purity and moral purity.In three studies,we explored what we call the ‘‘Macbeth effect’’—that is,a threat to one’s moral purity induces the need to clean onelf.This effect revealed itlf through an incread mental accessibility of cleansing-related concepts,a greater desire for cleansing products,and a greater likelihood of taking antiptic wipes.Furthermore,we showed that physical cleansing alleviates the uptting conquences of unethical behavior and reduces threats to one’s moral lf-image.Daily hygiene routines such as washing hands,as simple and benign as they might em,can deliver a powerful antidote to threatened morality,enabling people to truly wash away their sins.
W
hen we find ourlves in morally compromising situations,how do we deal with the conquences of un-ethical behavior,given that most if not all of us desire a moral lf-image?This paper inves-tigates a basic coping mechanism that has been ud by religions for centuries:washing away one _s sins.
Physical cleansing,such as bathing or washing hands,is at the core of many religious rituals.Baptism,for instance,is a water puri-fication ritual practiced by Christians,Man-daeanists,and Sikhs.Christians follow the admonition,B Ari and be baptized,and wash away your sins [(1),with faith that through the symbolic cleansing of their bodies they might also achieve a cleansing of conscience.Phys-ical cleansing is also central to Islam;wudu (often translated as B ablution [)is the Muslim act of washing parts of the body in clean water to prepare for worship.Likewi,Hinduism requires great attention to bodily purity (2).Thus,many major religions discipline bodily purity,suggesting that physical cleansing ceremonies can purify the soul.
Rearch on the correspondence between physical and moral purity (3)has speculated that people are predispod to u categories that are bad on bodily experience (such as clean versus dirty)to construct complex so-cial categories (such as moral versus im-moral)(4).For example,in English,words such as B clean [and B pure [describe both physical and moral states (e.g.,he has a clean record).Likewi,the Mandarin phra B a pair of dirty hands [refers to a person who steals.
The association between bodily and moral purity may be bad not only in cognition,but in emotion as well.As an example,
B disgust [reprents an emotion that is experienced in both physical and moral do-mains.Pure disgust was originally a gustatory emotion rooted in evolution to avoid the intake of potentially hazardous food.Over time,it has taken on social and cultural meanings and has expanded to encompass broader categories of aversions including social or moral violations (5,6).Although the experience of pure disgust devoid of mor-al connotations can be subjectively and behaviorally differentiated from the experi-ence of disgust with moral connotations (7),they coincide considerably.Specifically,pre-vious rearch suggests that pure disgust and moral disgust not only lead to similar facial expressions and physiological activation (6)but also recruit partially overlapping brain regions,mainly in the frontal and temporal lobes (7).Given the psychological,physio-logical,and neurological overlap between physical and moral disgust,physical cleans-ing acts that mitigate physical disgust might also reduce social or moral disgust,thereby alleviating moral condemnation.
Thus,Lady Macbeth _s hope that a little bit of water would clear her of the treacherous murder of King Duncan might not have been a product of literary creativity,but of Shakespeare _s acute understanding of the
human psyche.If physical and moral purity are so psychologically intertwined,Lady Macbeth _s desperate obssion with trying to wash away her bloodied conscience while crying,B Out,damned s
pot!Out,I say
