Journal ArticleDOI
Washing Away Your Sins: Threatened Morality and Physical Cleansing
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TLDR
It is shown that physical cleansing alleviates the upsetting consequences of unethical behavior and reduces threats to one's moral self-image, enabling people to truly wash away their sins.Abstract:
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 cleanse oneself. This effect revealed itself through an increased mental accessibility of cleansing-related concepts, a greater desire for cleansing products, and a greater likelihood of taking antiseptic wipes. Furthermore, we showed that physical cleansing alleviates the upsetting consequences of unethical behavior and reduces threats to one's moral self-image. Daily hygiene routines such as washing hands, as simple and benign as they might seem, can deliver a powerful antidote to threatened morality, enabling people to truly wash away their sins.read more
Citations
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Disgust as a disease-avoidance mechanism.
TL;DR: The authors find strong support for a disease-avoidance account of disgust and suggest that it offers a way to bridge the divide between concrete and ideational accounts of disgust.
Journal ArticleDOI
Mirror, mirror on my Facebook wall: effects of exposure to Facebook on self-esteem.
TL;DR: Results reveal that becoming self-aware by viewing one's own Facebook profile enhances self-esteem rather than diminishes it, and suggest that selective self-presentation in digital media, which leads to intensified relationship formation, also influences impressions of the self.
Journal ArticleDOI
Moral Self-Licensing: When Being Good Frees Us to Be Bad
TL;DR: In this article, moral self-licensing occurs when past moral behavior makes people more likely to do potentially immoral things without worrying about feeling or appearing immoral, i.e., when people are confident that their past behavior demonstrates compassion, generosity, or a lack of prejudice, such that an impeccable track record increases their propensity to engage in otherwise suspect actions.
Journal ArticleDOI
A metaphor-enriched social cognition.
TL;DR: This work proposes that social cognition can and should be enriched by an explicit recognition that conceptual metaphor is a unique cognitive mechanism that shapes social thought and attitudes, and introduces the metaphoric transfer strategy as a means of empirically assessing whether metaphors influence social information processing in ways that are distinct from the operation of schemas alone.
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Sinning Saints and Saintly Sinners The Paradox of Moral Self-Regulation
TL;DR: It is suggested that affirming a moral identity leads people to feel licensed to act immorally, however, when moral identity is threatened, moral behavior is a means to regain some lost self-worth.
References
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The Camphor Flame: Popular Hinduism and Society in India
TL;DR: The Camphor Flame as discussed by the authors is a rich and accessible study of popular Hinduism in the context of the society of contemporary India, which combines ethnographic case studies with comparative anthropological analysis and draws on textual and historical scholarship.