medicalxpress | While feelings of disgust can increase behaviors like lying and
cheating, cleanliness can help people return to ethical behavior,
according to a recent study by marketing experts at Rice University,
Pennsylvania State University and Arizona State University. The study
highlights the powerful impact emotions have on individual
decision-making.
"As an emotion, disgust
is designed as a protection," said Vikas Mittal, the J. Hugh Liedtke
Professor of Marketing at Rice's Jones Graduate School of Business.
"When people feel disgusted, they tend to remove themselves from a
situation. The instinct is to protect oneself. People become focused on
'self' and they're less likely to think about other people. Small
cheating starts to occur: If I'm disgusted and more focused on myself
and I need to lie a little bit to gain a small advantage, I'll do that.
That's the underlying mechanism."
In turn, the researchers found that cleansing behaviors actually
mitigate the self-serving effects of disgust. "If you can create
conditions where people's disgust is mitigated, you should not see this
(unethical) effect," Mittal said. "One way to mitigate disgust is to
make people think about something clean. If you can make people think of
cleaning products - for example, Kleenex or Windex - the emotion of
disgust is mitigated, so the likelihood of cheating also goes away.
People don't know it, but these small emotions are constantly affecting
them."
Vikas co-authored the paper with Karen Page Winterich, an associate
professor of marketing at Penn State's Smeal College of Business, and
Andrea Morales, a professor of marketing at Arizona State's W.P. Carey
School of Business. It will be published in the journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.
The researchers conducted three randomized experiments evoking
disgust through various means. The study involved 600 participants
around the United States; both genders were equally represented. In one
experiment, participants evaluated consumer products such as
antidiarrheal medicine, diapers, feminine care pads, cat litter and
adult incontinence products. In another, participants wrote essays about
their most disgusting memory. In the third, participants watched a
disgusting toilet scene from the movie "Trainspotting." Once effectively
disgusted, participants engaged in experiments that judged their
willingness to lie and cheat for financial gain. Mittal and colleagues
found that people who experienced disgust consistently engaged in
self-interested behaviors at a significantly higher rate than those who
did not.
