Moral Cleansing

Colin West and Chen-Bo Zhong
Current Opinion in Psychology
Available online 3 November 2015

Moral cleansing describes behaviors aimed at restoring moral self-worth in response to past transgressions. People are motivated to maintain a moral self-image and to eliminate apparent gaps between their perceived self-image and their desired moral self. Moral cleansing behaviors fall into three over-arching categories. Restitution cleansing behaviors directly resolve past misdeeds. Behavioral cleansing involves counter-balancing across multiple dimensions of the moral self whereby threats in one sub-domain are alleviated by bolstering a separate sub-domain. Symbolic cleansing includes restitution behaviors that are only symbolically connected to the provoking moral threat, such as physical or ritual cleansing. The moral cleansing literature seeks to understand these seemingly erratic sequences of compensatory behaviors.

“Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.” -Oscar Wilde

Highlights
• We review the literature on the psychology of moral cleansing.
• There are three categories: restitution, behavioral, and symbolic cleansing.
• The psychological mechanism is based on a malleable moral self-image.
• Moral cleansing examines the implications of sequential ethical decision-making.

The entire article is here.

White Coat

By Nancy Etcoff
Harvard Design Magazine
No. 40

Here is an excerpt:

Others wonder if the white coat is out of step in a culture of informality, and should be abandoned like the wigs of court dress in the United Kingdom—a topic of ongoing contention. Symbols of power and authority make people nervous, causing their blood pressure to rise (“white coat syndrome”) and their thoughts to shut down. Doctors seek compliance and trust. Today, they are taught to read emotional signals and are given empathy training. They no longer want to be intimidating authorities issuing orders, but providers offering services to clients. Fittingly, some are now wearing business attire.

But if some doctors are shedding the white coat, people in other professions are eager to put them on. They are showing up on different sorts of body experts, those found at cosmetic counters, spas, and salons, who are eager to align themselves with symbols of power and authority, and with the aura of objectivity, truth, and service.

The entire article is here.