Image: iStockphoto
-
The Wisdom of Psychopaths
In this engrossing journey into the lives of psychopaths and their infamously crafty behaviors, the renowned psychologist Kevin Dutton reveals that there is a...
Read More »
When people are asked to list their favorite metaphor, they typically cite great works of poetry, literature or oratory. Indeed, many metaphors are born from creative insight—Romeo likening Juliet to the rising sun or poet Robert Burns comparing his love to a red rose.
But there is more to metaphor than this.
Some metaphors are not literary creations at all—instead they seem to be built from the ground up, given to us by experience. For example, knowledge—an intangible, abstract concept—is often recast in terms of the concrete experience of sight. To know something is to see it, and so we often say that we see someone’s point or that an idea is clear. Metaphors of this sort—linking the abstract to the concrete, perceptual, and visceral—were studied systematically by the UC-Berkley cognitive linguist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson, at Brown University.
What they and others realized is that our concepts are fundamentally shaped by the fact that our minds reside in fleshy, physical bodies. As a result, even our most abstract concepts often have an “embodied” structure. In a classic example, people seem to understand moral virtue as if it were akin to physical cleanliness. To be virtuous is to be physically clean and free from the impurity that is sin. As the University of Pennsylvania psychologist and disgust expert Paul Rozin has shown, experiencing morality in terms of the embodied dimension of contagion can lead to some striking behaviors, such as the refusal to wear a sweater belonging to an evil person because it seems somehow contaminated by the evil essence of that person.
It’s clear that people talk about morality in purity terms—whether explicitly expressing concerns about contamination by evil or asserting that one’s “conscience is clean”—but do they also experience morality that way? Could it be that the embodied structure of morality operates covertly to guide moral judgment and behavior?
The Morality of Hand-Washing
Simone Schnall, Jennifer Benton and Sophie Harvey, psychologists at the University of Plymouth, have demonstrated just how this can happen. Having shown in previous studies that inducing disgust or a sense of dirtiness can make people’s moral judgments more severe, they set out to explore the opposite. Might physical cleanliness encourage less severe moral judgments? To test this idea, they had participants read brief vignettes describing morally questionable behaviors, such as falsifying information on a resume. Prior to reading and responding to these vignettes, “cleanliness” was induced either through the activation of purity-related concepts or through the direct experience of hand-washing.
In one study, participants were asked to form sentences from sets of several words. Some sets contained purity-related words, such as clean and pristine, whereas others (in the control condition) contained neutral (non-purity) words. In a second study, participants watched a disgust-inducing segment of the movie “Trainspotting,” after which they went to another room where they read the moral vignettes. Half of these participants were first asked to wash their hands in order to keep the staff room that was being used clean.
In both studies, the experience of “cleanliness”—either through the subtle priming of concepts about cleanliness or by actual cleansing—reduced people’s tendencies to see the behaviors described in the vignettes as morally wrong. Apparently, participants’ sense of physical purity influenced their evaluations of the actions of others (just as the induction of disgust had done in Schnall’s earlier studies). When they themselves were clean and pure, so were others.
See what we're tweeting about
8 Comments
Add CommentIs this Science of sunday school?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCan moral vitrue be measured?
Articles like this are why I stopped my subscription to Sci Am.
Unbelievable.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI still have my subscription to Science America and I like this article. Science and Religion do not need to be separated. God is an great Science
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisteacher.
moral virtue is an idea in someone's head, which can be measured by psychological survey just like anything else. this is a psychology article, having very little to do with religion. just because the concept of "moral virtue" is found in religion doesn't mean that A) religion is the only place moral virtue is addressed and B) anything mentioning moral virtue is related AT ALL to religion. i'm pretty sure that atheists would agree that a school teacher is probably more virtuous than a murderer. anyway... i like the article. :) trying to figure out how the mind maps abstract concepts is completely fascinating.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI don't think you can be too brutal where this is concerned. I believe someone who is interested in psychological science would certainly find this study very interesting. And I continue to enjoy most articles in SciAm as well.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI wonder if the finding that people who perceive themselves as clean, physically and/or morally, are less judgmental of others relates to the recent finding that internet porn viewing is more prevalent in more "pious" states.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOne might think that perhaps people would seek out such outlets more often in a more repressive community, but maybe it's also a case of those who are "guilty" being more apt to judge. Does it stem from a feeling of a need to "cleanse" oneself through extremely moral public behavior, specifically through the judgment of others? Kind of a "Methinks the lady doth protest too much" but with the protestations about others?
If an abstract idea cannot be described as a common experience, then what's a metaphor?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe external physical purity or impurity is not of tremendous importance. Even if one was to eat with hands not washed properly, the natural cleansing system in the body would address the issue, said Jesus. But internal spiritual purity or impurity has far reaching effects. The bad effect of violent, evil reasoning is more difficult to heal as it shapes the very behaviour of whole generations. Our deeper impurity is addressed only through the shed-blood provided by the ransom sacrifice of Jesus Christ.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this