Schwarz , N. & Lee, S. W.
University of Michigan, USA
Talk about morality often draws on metaphors of physical cleanliness, indicating that thought about “moral purity” is grounded in “physical purity”. Empirically, moral transgressions give rise to a desire to clean the body part involved in the transgression (e.g., to rinse one’s mouth after lying on voicemail, but to wash one’s hands after lying on email) and doing so attenuates the experience of guilt and the need to make amends. Going beyond the moral domain, recent work shows that physical cleansings can also remove traces of past behaviors that have no moral connotations. For example, cleaning one’s hands with an antiseptic wipe (as part of an alleged product test) is sufficient to eliminate post-decisional dissonance effects after making a difficult choice and to attenuate the impact of sunk cost on later decisions. The influence of physical cleansings is not limited to past experiences that people may want to wipe off (such as bad luck) but also extends to positive traces they’d rather keep (such as good luck). For example, gamblers bet more after a series of wins than after a series of losses -- yet washing their hands as part of a “product test” eliminates the impact of previous good as well as bad luck on subsequent risk taking. Current studies explore the moderators and mediators of “clean slate” effects.