This month's featured article--a brief report of four studies at Northwestern University--has received a good bit of attention recently in the popular press (e.g., New York Times, ABC News, National Public Radio, and the Washington Post). It has been selected as our Article-of-the-Month because it addresses physical washing as a moral coping mechanism, and this may have relevance for the practical work of chaplains.

SUMMARY: Chen-Bo Zhong (Assistant Professor, University of Toronto) and Katie Liljenquist (PhD Candidate, Northwestern University) used students at Northwestern University "to investigate (i) whether a threat to moral purity activates a need for physical cleansing... and (ii) whether physical cleansing is actually efficacious in helping people cope with moral threats" [p. 1451]. Their four studies, building one upon another in this investigation, used quite clever methodologies to detect participants' tendencies when faced with a morally objectionable memory or written scenario.

And what of chaplains' own needs for cleansing after working closely with patients whose stories may contain unethical or immoral content? How might chaplains' empathy for patients cause them to appropriate patients' stories in a way similar to the way the students in Study 2 came to take on the scenarios they copied? These are, of course, research questions themselves, and chaplains may find productive partnerships with academic researchers here both as advisors to the study of patients and as subjects themselves.

Suggestions for the Use of the Article for Discussion in CPE: 

This is a very short article (two pages), so its assignment could be incorporated easily anytime during a CPE unit. Students could obviously discuss the role of religious cleansing rituals and be challenged to think about how any cleansing action may have moral import for a patient. Also, might there be pastoral circumstances that could lead a chaplain to visit intentionally prior to a patient's planned bathing? Or, how might visiting right after a patient has bathed affect the content of the encounter?

The authors discuss the "Lady MacBeth Effect." Have students ever seen indications of this? Also, the article outlines the theory of the mechanism by which physical cleansing may have a compensatory effect on feelings of moral impurity [--see p. 1452], and this mechanism is worth talking through with students.

Related Items of Interest: 

I.   Zhong and Liljenquist offer a very sparse bibliography, and their five article citations do not note titles. Below are the full citations for the five articles, with abstracts. These are, however, quite technical.

Haidt, J., Rozin, P., McCauley, C. and Imada, S. "Body, psyche, and culture: the relationship between disgust and morality." Psychology and Developing Societies 9, no. 1 (January-June 1997): 107-131. [(Abstract:) "Core disgust" is a food related emotion that is rooted in evolution but is also a cultural product. Seven categories of disgust elicitors have been observed in an American sample. These include food, animals, body products, sexual deviance, body-envelope violations, poor hygiene, and contact with death. In addition, social concerns such as interpersonal contamination, and sociomoral violations are also associated with disgust. Cross-cultural analyses of disgust and its elicitors using Israeli, Japanese, Greek and Hopi notions of disgust were undertaken. It was noted that disgust elicitors have expanded from food to the social order and have been found in many cultures. Explanations for this expansion are provided in terms of embodied schemata, which refer to imaginative structures or patterns of experience that are based on bodily knowledge or sensation. A mechanism is suggested whereby disgust elicitors are viewed as a prototypically defined category involving many of the embodied schemata of disgust. It is argued that each culture draws upon these schemata and its social and moral life is based on them.]

Moll, J., de Oliveira-Souza, R., Moll, F. T., Ignacio, F. A., Bramati, I. E., Caparelli-Dáquer, E. M. and Eslinger, P. J. "The moral affiliations of disgust: a functional MRI study." Cognitive and Behavioral Neurology 18, no. 1 (March 2005): 68-78. [(From the abstract, p. 68:) …Thirteen normal adult volunteers were investigated with functional magnetic resonance imaging as they read a series of statements depicting scenarios of pure disgust, indignation, and neutral emotion. After the scanning procedure, they assigned one basic and one moral emotion to each stimulus from an array of six basic and seven moral emotions. Results indicated that (a) emotional stimuli may evoke pure disgust with or without indignation, (b) these different aspects of the experience of disgust could be elicited by a set of written statements, and (c) pure disgust and indignation recruited both overlapping and distinct brain regions, mainly in the frontal and temporal lobes. This work underscores the importance of the prefrontal and orbitofrontal cortices in moral judgment and in the automatic attribution of morality to social events. Human disgust encompasses a variety of emotional experiences that are ingrained in frontal, temporal, and limbic networks.]

Rozin, P., Lowery, L. and Ebert, R. "Varieties of disgust faces and the structure of disgust." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 66, no. 5 (May 1994): 870-881. [(Abstract, from p. 870:) In 3 facial expression identification studies, college students matched a variety of disgust faces to verbally described eliciting situations. The faces depicted specific muscle action movements in accordance with P. Ekman and W. V. Friesen's (1978) Facial Action Coding System. The nose wrinkle is associated with either irritating or offensive smells and, to some extent, bad tastes. Gape and tongue extrusion are associated primarily with what we call core or food-offense disgust and also oral irritation. The broader range of disgust elicitors, including stimuli that remind humans of their animal origins (e.g., body boundary violations, inappropriate sex, poor hygiene, and death), a variety of aversive interpersonal contacts, and certain moral offenses are associated primarily with the raised upper lip. The results support a theory of disgust that posits its origin as a response to bad tastes and maps its evolution onto a moral emotion.]

Tetlock, P. E., Kristel, O. V., Elson, S. B., Green, M. C. and Lerner, J. S. "The psychology of the unthinkable: taboo trade-offs, forbidden base rates, and heretical counterfactuals." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 78, no. 5 (May 2000): 853-870. [(Abstract, from p. 853:) Five studies explored cognitive, affective, and behavioral responses to proscribed forms of social cognition. Experiments 1 and 2 revealed that people responded to taboo trade-offs that monetized sacred values with moral outrage and cleansing. Experiments 3 and 4 revealed that racial egalitarians were least likely to use, and angriest at those who did use, race-tainted base rates and that egalitarians who inadvertently used such base rates tried to reaffirm their fair-mindedness. Experiment 5 revealed that Christian fundamentalists were most likely to reject heretical counterfactuals that applied everyday causal schemata to Biblical narratives and to engage in moral cleansing after merely contemplating such possibilities. Although the results fit the sacred-value-protection model (SVPM) better than rival formulations, the SVPM must draw on cross-cultural taxonomies of relational schemata to specify normative boundaries on thought.]

Wicklund, R. A. and Gollwitzer, P. M. "Symbolic self-completion, attempted influence, and self-deception." Basic and Applied Social Psychology 2, no. 2 (June 1981): 89-114. [(Abstract, from p. 89:) A concept of symbolic self-completion states that people define themselves as musicians, athletes, etc. by use of indicators of attainment in those activity realms, such as possessing a prestige job, having extensive education, or whatever is recognized by others as indicating progress toward completing the self-definition. The self-completion idea postulates that when important symbols—indicators of self-definition—are lacking, the person will strive after further, alternative symbols of the self-definition. In the present research two modes of symbolizing completeness were studied: (1) attempting to influence others directly within the self-definitional area; or (2) simple self-descriptions of one's own performance, such that others would be exposed to those self-descriptions. Two correlational studies showed that the less education (Study 1) or on-the-job experience (Study 2) subjects had, the more they desired to influence others. Experimental subjects (Study 3) who were interrupted while writing a positive, self-descriptive statement manifested stronger influence attempts than did subjects who were allowed to finish. Finally, Study 4 examined self-descriptions as a self-symbolizing effort. Incompleteness was varied by means of a salience-of-past-teacher manipulation. When pressure was placed on subjects to characterize themselves negatively within their respective areas, those for whom a positive teacher was salient were the most willing to be negative. The interpretation of these findings assumes that influencing others, as well as positive self-descriptions, can further the individual's sense of having a complete self-definition.]

II.   For basic information about ablution practices in major religions, see the entry for Ablution from Wikipedia. This resource, however, should be consulted with caution, as it is the product of an open-editing online process.