Comments on: Could It Be That Easy?

By: Every little bit doesn’t count « Robert Wiblin

Every little bit doesn’t count « Robert Wiblin — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 09:49:32 +0000

[...] The implication seem to be that often when someone does something ‘good’, it will often simply crowd out something else good they might have done later. If people are buying more green cleaning products, they might also be slacking more on the cleaning. [...]

By: Could It Be That Easy? » Dig for Leadership - Stories that try to make the world a better place.

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 16:11:07 +0000

[...] in] a forthcoming issue of Psychological Science. … “Could be that getting our kids to… carry on reading. AKPC_IDS += "1247,"; (No Ratings Yet) Loading … Posted in Leadership | Tagged [...]

By: Marc

Marc — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 10:11:12 +0000

Tying in to what you were saying about global warming, I wonder whether the effect works in reverse. Human behaviour does seem to have a strange relationship with causality; being confident leads you to stand up straighter, but standing up straighter leads you to feel more confident.

If cleanliness causes ethical behaviour, I wonder if people equate ethical behaviour causing cleaniness.

That would explain why environmentalists are so positive about limiting carbon emissions (the cleanliness of reducing carbon being a short hand for ‘ethical’) but so negative about geo-engineering (making the planet ‘dirtier’ can’t be ‘ethical’) when both policies are intended to fight the same menace of global warming.

By: Phil Goetz

Phil Goetz — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 23:57:02 +0000

Maybe people were generous because they were less rational, because they were high on Windex fumes.

By: John Maxwell IV

John Maxwell IV — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 04:43:49 +0000

I wonder if I can induce a similar effect in myself by sucking on mints or something. I certainly have noticed that taking regular showers and wearing a decent pair of jeans results in increased confidence

By: agnostic

agnostic — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 04:21:31 +0000

Wait, you didn’t get what I said. Broken windows aren’t smelly, so this study doesn’t say that broken windows will be worse than we already thought. However, offenses that are smelly will make us even less cooperative than other failures to coordinate — there’s the effect we expect from merely witnessing the failure, *plus* the foul smell lowering cooperation even lower.

So, coordination that involves making something less stinky will be even harder than you’d think based on broken windows alone.

By: Chris

Chris — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 03:22:37 +0000

“Embedded cognition theory?” No. They don’t even cite Damasio, and that theory is pretty under the radar. It doesn’t really exist in the literature, in fact.

This research is more related to two recent strains. The first, in moral psychology, focuses on emotions and morality. Cleanliness, disgust, contamination, etc. figure largely in this literature. The second is Lakoff’s work on conceptual metaphors and the way in which bodily experiences tend to activate conceptual representations.

As for the actual research itself, I’m somewhat skeptical for a couple reasons. The first is statistical: the effect size is pretty small in the first study (Cohen’s d = .47), so I’d focus on the first. And in the first, there’s a ton of noise, especially in the neutral room condition (the standard deviation is much higher in the neutral room condition in both studies, strangely). I’d love to see their data, because high standard deviation (2.81 with a mean of 2.81) with such a small sample (n=14), and the huge effect size not just for the manipulation but for that task in general, suggests there might be something going on. Outliers? Bimodal distribution? Something.

The second is that there’s no real theory of how cleanliness, or smells, or Windex in particular, could activate moral concepts/behavior. So we really have no idea what’s going on here. It may be something as simple as the smell heightening arousal, in which case, providing any mildly arousing stimulus could produce similar affects. In fact, to do a proper experiment, you’d have to include such a condition.

By: JU

JU — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 03:07:54 +0000

You say that like it’s something bad in and of itself. And what does it mean to equate the two? They are similar in that both the homeless and convicts (while in prison) tend to act less socially virtuous than everyday people. I do not think homelessness is caused by lack of virtue (though it can be), but I think the period when someone is homeless can lead them to become cynical and angry in a way that hurts themselves. Buddy.

By: Clean Rooms and Clean Hearts : Mormon Metaphysics

Clean Rooms and Clean Hearts : Mormon Metaphysics — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 02:00:05 +0000

[...] Working in a room scented with Windex leads to more ethical behavior. Wild study. There have been prior studies tying physical feelings of cleanliness with ethical conceptions of being clean. So the cognitive connection may be deeper than originally thought. [...]

By: Robert Wiblin

Robert Wiblin — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 00:27:43 +0000

I like that idea. People who are more likely to break the rules when other people are breaking them (seems a sensible strategy to not be a dupe for no good reason).

If the same response is triggered in the brain by disgust at misconduct and disgust at filth, then we might be primed to misbehave in response to both.