Physical cleansing biases recognition performance for (im)moral social issues

Abstract

Previous research showed that physical cleansing can affect moral judgements, indicating a functional link between the concepts of physical and moral purity. The act of cleansing one's own hands was also found to influence cognitive processes beyond the moral domain. Overall, research suggests that physical cleansing can bias cognitive information processing. To investigate this assumption, we extended the hitherto scope in this research line and examined cleanliness effects on memory performance. For the first time, we scrutinized the effect of hand cleansing on the recall and recognition performance for (im)moral social issues. We found that cleansing produced a significant increase in participants' memory for immoral versus moral social issues at the level of recognition performance, whereas free recall was not affected. This negativity bias occurred independently of whether cleansing was performed before or after the learning phase, indicating that cleansing has an effect on the retrieval of information from memory.