(Press-News.org) ANN ARBOR, Mich.---Apparently your mom had it right when she threatened to wash your mouth out with soap if you talked dirty. Lying really does create a desire to clean the "dirty" body part, according to a University of Michigan study.
"The references to 'dirty hands' or 'dirty mouths' in everyday language suggest that people think about abstract issues of moral purity in terms of more concrete experiences with physical purity," said Spike W.S. Lee, a U-M doctoral candidate in psychology, who conducted the study with Norbert Schwarz, a psychologist at the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR), the Ross School of Business, and the U-M psychology department.
The findings of the study, published in the current (October) issue of Psychological Science, support that connection.
For the study, Lee and Schwarz asked 87 students to play the role of lawyers competing with a colleague, "Chris," for a promotion. Each was asked to imagine they found an important document that Chris had lost, and that returning the document would help his career and hurt their own career. Each participant was instructed to leave Chris a message by either voice mail or email, telling him who they were and either lying that they could not find his document or telling the truth that they had found the document.
Next, participants rated the desirability of several products as part of a supposed marketing survey and reported how much they were willing to pay for each product. The products included mouthwash and hand sanitizer.
Study participants who lied on the phone, leaving an untrue and malevolent voicemail, felt a stronger desire for mouthwash and were willing to pay more for it than those who lied on e-mail. And conversely, those who lied on e-mail, typing the same mean message, felt a stronger desire for hand sanitizer and were willing to pay more for that. Saying nice and ethical things, on the other hand, made it less appealing to clean the body part involved in conveying the message.
In scientific terms, the findings showed that "the embodiment of moral purity is specific to the motor modality involved in the moral transgression." Verbal lying increased participants' assessment of mouthwash while lying on e-mail, using their hands, increased the assessment of hand sanitizer's value.
"This study shows how 'concrete' the metaphorical links are between abstract and concrete domains of life," Schwarz said. "Not only do people want to clean after a dirty deed, they want to clean the specific body part involved."
###
Established in 1949, the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research (ISR) is the world's largest academic social science survey and research organization, and a world leader in developing and applying social science methodology, and in educating researchers and students from around the world. ISR conducts some of the most widely-cited studies in the nation, including the Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan Surveys of Consumers, the American National Election Studies, the Monitoring the Future Study, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, the Health and Retirement Study, the Columbia County Longitudinal Study and the National Survey of Black Americans. ISR researchers also collaborate with social scientists in more than 60 nations on the World Values Surveys and other projects, and the Institute has established formal ties with universities in Poland, China, and South Africa. ISR is also home to the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), the world's largest digital social science data archive. Visit the ISR Web site at http://www.isr.umich.edu for more information.
Social promotions such as those offered by deal-of-the-day website Groupon are wildly popular with shoppers, but they might not be as big a hit for businesses, according to a recent study by Rice University's Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Business.
Groupon promotions were profitable for 66 percent of the businesses surveyed for the study, but they were unprofitable for 32 percent. More than 40 percent of the respondents indicated they would not run such a promotion again.
Groupon is a social promotion site that features a daily deal for each city in which it operates ...
Administering a new form of immunotherapy to children with neuroblastoma, a nervous system cancer, increased the percentage of those who were alive and free of disease progression after two years, according to researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and fellow institutions. The percentage rose from 46 percent for children receiving a standard therapy to 66 percent for children receiving immunotherapy plus standard therapy, according to the study published in the Sept. 30, 2010 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.
"This is the ...
A research and development effort by the University of Notre Dame, the University of Wyoming, and Kraig Biocraft Laboratories, Inc. has succeeded in producing transgenic silkworms capable of spinning artificial spider silks.
"This research represents a significant breakthrough in the development of superior silk fibers for both medical and non-medical applications," said Malcolm J. Fraser Jr., a Notre Dame professor of biological sciences. "The generation of silk fibers having the properties of spider silks has been one of the important goals in materials science."
Natural ...
A CEO's fate might be in the hands of external constituents, according to a new study from Rice University's Jones Graduate School of Business. The study found that investment analysts and their negative stock ratings can sway a board to dismiss its CEO.
Conventional research has focused on internal factors that contribute to CEO dismissal -- poor firm performance and organization power and politics. But the new study, published by the Strategic Management Journal, turned its attention outward to discover the significant influence investment analysts have on a board ...
NASA has chosen the Naval Research Laboratory's (NRL's) Wide-field Imager to be part of the Solar Probe Plus mission slated for launch no later than 2018. The Solar Probe Plus, a small car-sized spacecraft will plunge directly into the sun's atmosphere approximately four million miles from our star's surface. It will explore a region no other spacecraft ever has encountered in an effort to unlock the sun's biggest mysteries.
For decades, scientists have known that the corona, or the outer atmosphere, is several hundreds of times hotter than the visible solar surface ...
Cigarettes are the most frequent cause of fatalities from residential fires in the United States. So, it might seem surprising to learn that a cigarette that burns stronger than others has been used for decades by manufacturers of home furnishings to test the fire resistance of their products. Making certain that they can continue this life- and property-saving effort is the job of a new standard reference material (SRM) from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
NIST SRM 1196, "Standard Cigarette for Ignition Resistance Testing," consists of 10 packs ...
OAK BROOK, Ill. – September 29, 2010 – The October issue of GIE: Gastrointestinal Endoscopy, the monthly peer-reviewed scientific journal of the American Society for Gastrointestinal Endoscopy (ASGE), features the results of two randomized controlled trials of unsedated colonoscopy comparing water infusion versus air insufflation to distend the colon. Both studies showed that patient tolerance with the water method during unsedated colonoscopy was greater than with air insufflation and enhanced patient willingness to undergo a repeat unsedated exam; however, the cecal intubation ...
While refining their novel method for making nanoscale wires, chemists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) discovered an unexpected bonus—a new way to create nanowires that produce light similar to that from light-emitting diodes (LEDs). These "nano-LEDs" may one day have their light-emission abilities put to work serving miniature devices such as nanogenerators or lab-on-a-chip systems.
Nanowires typically are "grown" by the controlled deposition of molecules—zinc oxide, for example—from a gas onto a base material, a process called chemical vapor ...
Light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, have become popular with backpackers and cyclists who mount them on headbands for a reliable, hands-free source of illumination. Now, a new lab at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is helping to bring these tiny but brilliant devices into your home, to help save both energy costs and the environment.
"LEDs can be very energy efficient, and they are a lot smaller and last a lot longer than light bulbs," says NIST vision scientist Wendy Davis. "They're what we'll likely use in the future to light our houses and public ...
Bowling Green, OH—September 29, 2010— A forthcoming issue of the Journal of Marriage and Family states that children today are less likely to be born into a "traditional" family structure, defined as two biological married parents. Growing numbers of children in the United States experience multiple family living arrangements during childhood. How these transitions affect the individual child's well-being needs to be fully addressed by researchers and policymakers alike. This article fully reviews the existing research from the past ten years on these topics in an effort ...
