subjects who are asked to wash their hands with soap before filling out questionnaires become more moralistic about issues related to moral purity (such as pornography and drug use).25 Once you’re clean, you want to keep dirty things far away. Zhong has also shown the reverse process: immorality makes people want to get clean. People who are asked to recall their own moral transgressions, or merely to copy by hand an account of someone else’s moral transgression, find themselves thinking about cleanliness more often, and wanting more strongly to cleanse themselves.
