Clean People Feel Morally Superior | Hacker News Reader

Clean People Feel Morally Superior

wired.com

67 pointsrobg42 comments

The same is true for nicely dressed people.

I bought my first suit last week and walked around downtown feeling all smug - I wasn't even trying to feel smug and yet when you're the best dressed in the room it goes right to your head.

Lame...

Yup. In fact, this is a benefit to dressing up before a public performance or interview. You don't have to deck yourself out with a full-on suit. But dressing up has been shown to decrease communication apprehension.

When doing phone sales or interviews, I often put on a suit beforehand so I sound smarter and more smug over the phone. Odd, but it works.

I feel the same way when I dress really nicely for work. I type the code, the compiler disagrees with it, and I feel self-confident enough to tell the compiler it's wrong.

No actual product is produced, but at least I look nice while not producing anything.

I think smugness results from my brain getting too confused as the tie cuts its supply of blood flow and oxygen.

Think of the suit as an #DEFINE for the programs you are attempting to run on the relatively opaque interpreters that come builtin to the monkey brains we all use to think with.

The parameters you are setting when you wear a suit are the authority and credibility that the person hearing you should grant you. The seriousness with which they should consider your proposal, and the priority of your claim on their time and attention.

You described it in very negative terms, but I don't think it's necessarily that way. Humans are social creatures, and can't help it but judge someone they have no other information about based on the clothes.

If you're happy because you're dressed well, it doesn't have to mean you're "smug" - taking care of your looks shows that you care about other people's quality of interaction with you - everybody would rather interact with a person dressed nicely as opposed to if the same person dressed like a bum.

Also, there's something to be said about a confidence boost that you get knowing you're looking well kept. Most geeks will happily ignore all these points, but I think that's a mistake.

I agree that dressing nicely is a good way to communicate that you're serious about interacting with others.

You certainly don't want to come across as unprofessional and it's important to show others that you're putting forth your best effort (including appearance) for the work at hand.

I've just started wearing my work boots again (sneakers are falling apart) and they give an incredible sense. The sturdiness of the boot makes every step feel perfect and reassuring; even just walking down the hallway to get a drink becomes a wonderful experience as I take in the sense of confidence and surety that having a good pair of boots gives.

On a slightly related note I used to maintain highly manicured gardens for people in wealthy neighborhoods. A lot of these people were anal-retentive WASP's that scowled from their high perch as they surveyed a neighbors over-grown garden. They especially liked my leaf-blower because I could get all their hard surfaces perfectly clean. Many of them would also not hesitate to let me know I missed blowing a few pine needles. That job started to make me neurotic after a few years.

What's interesting is that it isn't a new phenomenon; Veblen wrote about our strange lawn-care fetishism in The Theory of the Leisure Class in 1899.

Sayed Kotb also commented on it after his visit to the United States in the 1940s, considering it a vulgar preoccupation.

For all his many faults, I feel he was on to something there.

Look I've got a yard and gardens. I enjoy a well cut lawn and tidy hard surfaces (though prefer a straw broom to a leaf blower). There's a lot of reward for creating a tidy home and surrounds, particularly if you spend much of the day in front of a computer.

I think some people just like tidiness. You don't have to be of any particular persuasion to enjoy a well cared for garden.

Interesting, if not relevant, tangent: Modern LDS missionaries are expected to bathe daily, without fail, when they are abroad proselytizing. I have heard anecdotal accounts of this causing some friction with their hosts due to the custom of daily bathing being wasteful/abnormal and/or a hardship on the local water supply.

This article makes me wonder if this psychological effect has been known by various religious groups for quite some time. From old-school Judeo-Christian "laws of cleanliness" to the more modern LDS church, keeping clean may be about self-righteousness more than sanitation.

Very interesting experiments, nonetheless.

I believe the title should read "Clean Undergrads at Northwestern University Feel Morally Superior." FTA: "Some 58 undergrads were invited to a lab filled with spotless new equipment." I don't think this sample has any remote chance of being representative of the "People" population.

The "clean" and "dirty" passages used in the follow up studies employ very strong positive and negative words, respectively, and no control group seems to have been used to compare how people make moral judgments after reading very positive or very negative passages irrespective of cleanliness.

This is not even pop science it's trash science. It's dirty, but reading it makes me feel more morally superior, not less, contrary to the conclusion of the "study."

Well it is easier to get away with being a jerk when you don't smell like B.O.

The first experiment is clearly suspect. I strikes me as equally like the people who washed their hands held themselves, and society, to a higher standard than those who didn't and thus where harsher in theory judgments.

In the later two, I'd like to see if the result differed greatly by having students read passages about how smart/stupid they were or how attractive/ugly they were.

This makes self-righteous dreadlocked Marxist-toting hippie activists all the more puzzling.

As a self-righteous slob, let me be the first to say that clean people don't have a monopoly on smugness.

Honest, self critical slobs, that are able to view themselves from others' point of view, and still make a conscious choice to be slobs are alright in my book.

Is this a regional thing? I don't think I've ever seen one of these.

I spent three semesters at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Can you imagine if they were clean?

Your puzzlement is predicated on the assumption that dreadlocked hippie activists are automatically unclean.

Have you ever got up close and personal with dreadlocks? There's no way to keep them clean.

Yes and that's untrue.

They tote Marxists? No wonder they're smug; they must be incredibly strong!

If this really is true, might there be an in-built evolutionary aspect? That people who have an inbuilt tendency towards cleanliness have less chance of contracting disease?

All those religious texts and 'cleanliness is next to Godliness' - surely it can't just be a modern phenomonen? Even baptism - the act of dunking onesself in a river - must be considered cleaning for the purposes of being superior?

Note I don't expect this to be taken seriously and I'm no theological expert, but there is a talking point why cleaning pops up so frequently in religious texts of all persuasions. There surely is an element of life instruction in religious texts that drop below the moral level (do not lie) and into the physical level (clean yourself)

In Polish you literaly have "clean or dirty conscience", Bible also tells much about cleaning sbd's sins.

I'd like to see if this is about language (people primmed with concept being close to each other in language skew their judgements), or is this universal link between ethic and hygiene.

Maybe being clean is universaly considered good thing, but there are other more arbitrary associations that could be checked - for example in Polish "prawy" means "right" and also "good". Probably there are some cultures where it's the left that is associated with high ethic standards.

These 2 cultures should skew their moral judgaments to opposite directions when primmed with either "right" or "left".

Clean conscience is also a common English phrase, though, 'dirty conscience' isn't - but people would understand what you meant.

Tbh, I'm not so sure about the accuracy of this study (and of 'experimental' social psychology in general - though that's another issue altogether)...but I guess I always new those tidy, short-haired bastards were uptight.

Well maybe they are. Why bother with peoples feeling's about x before bothering about x itself.

"Clean people commit less crimes." Not unthinkable.

I'll grant you that it's not unthinkable. But I think it's highly unlikely that there's any kind of non-spurrious correlation between cleanliness and crime.

I find it just as plausible as the idea here that it makes you more morally judgemental of others. If it makes you more judgemental of others, it might well make you more judgemental of yourself.

I don't know if we can necessarily cut street crime by handing out free showers to bums and thugs. Might be worth a try.

"Clean people commit less crimes." Not unthinkable.

Correlation, causation, etc., etc.

Clean people commit fewer street crimes, probably, but when was the last time a poorly-dressed bum stole the pension fund for a major corporation?

Biden said Obama was Clean.... probably what he meant was that he was superior.

Couldn't this be an expectation issue? Washing their hands signaled to the subjects that they were in a more "proper" social environment. To fit in, they may have judged the social issues more harshly.

Cleanliness is just a form of purity, which key value of morality.

Jonathan Haidt's work in this regard is fascinating.

On the theme of the difficulty of making definite judgement with social-scientific experiment, I would say it's hard to separate out rather a specific state/behavior like "cleanness". Whether it is induced or normally occurring, it goes with a lot of broad social tendencies.

In the first phase of the experiment, it's possible that asking people to do some other ritual-type behavior might or might not have had the same effect.

In the second phase, having people read "I am good/bad" or "I make correct/incorrect" decisions again might or might not have had the same effect.

Move over, while reading about cleanness and cleaning yourself seems like a way to do this separating out, this approach relies, at the very least, on the assumption that imagining something is comparable to experiencing it.

You're correct in assuming that it's difficult to extract correct conclusions from a psychology experiment, just like with any other science. Moreso with psychology than other fields though because humans are complex beings.

But logically speaking, how do you make psychology beneficial to society without making a few assumptions? Math, for instance, is nothing but a set of rules built on top of assumptions. Yes, we can point out all the potential edge-cases all day. But that won't put our society any closer to understanding the human psyche than when we started.

Of course as an alternative, you could just accept the team's conclusions: "Acts of cleanliness have not only the potential to shift our moral pendulum to a more virtuous self, but also license harsher moral judgment of others." To me, that seems like a valid conclusion to draw based on the research. Would you not agree?

>You're correct in assuming that it's difficult to extract correct conclusions from a psychology experiment, just like with any other science.

In psychology it is much much more difficult to tease out "correct" conclusions than in, for example, physics. This is a result of 1) the complicated nature of human behavior, which is not subject to (in comparison) simple mathematical formula; and 2) the unethical nature of trying to measure the effects of bizarre environments on children in order to analyze development.

This is what you said right afterwards, of course.

But the fuzzy sciences face challenges that naturally make them less rigorous in the scope of their conclusions.

I am not against engaging in social science. But I am against ignoring the tenuousness of social science's conclusion. Don't confuse "the best we can do" with correct.

The article's conclusion is plausible but far from "established".

Math, for instance, is nothing but a set of rules built on top of assumptions.

There's question logicians argue about quite a bit. I would side with folks who view math as nothing but a system for analyzing abstract rule system but which doesn't care at all whether the rules themselves are true or false.

In this sense, math isn't dependent on any assumptions besides the existence of some sort of abstract machine. I know Kurt Godel disagreed with this but it's still complete consistent interpretation of math.

In anycase, this is a bit different from social science, which has to make assumptions every step of the way (not necessary bad but definitely different).

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