Ritual Cleanliness Makes Immoral Behavior Feel More Acceptable

Simone Schnall of the University of Plymouth has published in Psychological Science a study revealing that physical purification or feelings of purification make it easier to accept immoral acts. This holds serious implications for religion because of how many religions make such an emphasis on ritual purification and acts of physical purification. People believe that religion makes a person more moral, but what if fundamental religious doctrines or traditions actually have the opposite effect?

The first asked 40 volunteers to unscramble sentences. Half were given sentences containing words associated with purity and cleanliness, such as “pure”, “washed”, “clean”, “immaculate” and “pristine”. Those given to the other half contained only neutral words. The volunteers were then asked to describe how they would rate a series of acts on an ethical scale ranging from zero (perfectly okay) to nine (very wrong). These varied from taking money found in a lost wallet, via eating a family’s dead dog to avoid starvation, to using a kitten for sexual arousal.

The second experiment exposed 44 volunteers to a three-minute clip from “Trainspotting”, a film that is well known for eliciting feelings of disgust, to make them all feel unclean. The volunteers were then asked to describe how they would rate the same series of acts as in the first experiment. However, after watching the clip and before being exposed to the ethical questions, half of the participants were told that the room in which they were to do the rating was a sterile staff space that needed to be kept clean. They were therefore asked, please, to wash their hands with soap and water when entering.

The researchers report that those who were given the “clean” words or who washed themselves rated the acts they were asked to consider as ethically more acceptable than the control groups did. Among the volunteers who unscrambled the sentences, those exposed to ideas of cleanliness rated eating the family dog at 5.7, on average, on the wrongness scale whereas the control group rated it as 6.6. Their score for using a kitten in sexual play was 6.7; the control group individuals gave it 8.3. Similar results arose from the handwashing experiment.

Source: The Economist

The existence of a psychological connection between feeling "clean" — whether it's merely just physically clean or even ritually clean — and being willing to tolerate the presence of greater moral evil doesn't seem all that surprising to me, in retrospect, but it's still very curious. This raises a lot of interesting questions about the ability of religion to sanctify violence but it may also help answer a few. Many wonder how religions that preach love and peace could also lead to death and violence, but if religious leaders make a point of including purification rituals alongside calls to violence, that may help explain how the violence and peace can be combined.

Obviously religion isn't the only potential source of this because even just washing your hands can produce the same effect, but is there any place outside religion where we find purification rituals which are performed precisely for the sake of relieving a person of stains of sin, immorality, and spiritual uncleanness? Is there any political, philosophical, or economic ideology which might have people engage in some sort of cleaning procedure before being told to engage in some act of violence against other human beings? It seems to me that this is another example of how religion isn't necessarily the only source of a problem, but in practice is place where we are more likely to find it or are likely to encounter it to a degree that it worse than elsewhere.