in all mammals it processes information from the nose and the
tongue. It helps guide the animal toward the right foods and away
from the wrong ones. But in humans, this ancient food-processing
center has taken on new duties, and it now guides our taste in
people. It gets more active when we see something morally shy,
particularly something disgusting, as well as garden-variety
unfairness.
21
If we had some sort of tiny electrode that could be
threaded up through people’s noses and into their insulas, we could
then control their elephants, making them steer away from
whatever they were viewing at the moment when we pressed the
button. We’ve got such an electrode. It’s called fart spray.
Alex Jordan, a grad student at Stanford, came up with the idea of
asking people to make moral judgments while he secretly tripped
their disgust alarms. He stood at a pedestrian intersection on the
Stanford campus and asked passersby to ll out a short survey. It
asked people to make judgments about four controversial issues,
such as marriage between rst cousins, or a lm studio’s decision to
release a documentary with a director who had tricked some people
into being interviewed.
Alex stood right next to a trash can he had emptied. Before he
recruited each subject, he put a new plastic liner into the metal can.
Before half of the people walked up (and before they could see him),
he sprayed the fart spray twice into the bag, which “perfumed” the
whole intersection for a few minutes. Before other recruitments, he
left the empty bag unsprayed.
Sure enough, people made harsher judgments when they were
breathing in foul air.
22
Other researchers have found the same e ect
by asking subjects to ll out questionnaires after drinking bitter
versus sweet drinks.
23
As my UVA colleague Jerry Clore puts it, we
use “a ect as information.”
24
When we’re trying to decide what we
think about something, we look inward, at how we’re feeling. If I’m
feeling good, I must like it, and if I’m feeling anything unpleasant,
that must mean I don’t like it.
You don’t even need to trigger feelings of disgust to get these
e ects. Simply washing your hands will do it. Chenbo Zhong at the
University of Toronto has shown that subjects who are asked to
wash their hands with soap before lling 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, nd themselves thinking about
cleanliness more often, and wanting more strongly to cleanse
themselves.
26
They are more likely to select hand wipes and other
cleaning products when given a choice of consumer products to take
home with them after the experiment. Zhong calls this the Macbeth
e ect, named for Lady Macbeth’s obsession with water and
cleansing after she goads her husband into murdering King Duncan.
(She goes from “A little water clears us of this deed” to “Out,
damn’d spot! out, I say!”)
In other words, there’s a two-way street between our bodies and
our righteous minds. Immorality makes us feel physically dirty, and
cleansing ourselves can sometimes make us more concerned about
guarding our moral purity. In one of the most bizarre
demonstrations of this e ect, Eric Helzer and David Pizarro asked
students at Cornell University to ll out surveys about their political
attitudes while standing near (or far from) a hand sanitizer
dispenser. Those told to stand near the sanitizer became temporarily
more conservative.
27
Moral judgment is not a purely cerebral a air in which we weigh
concerns about harm, rights, and justice. It’s a kind of rapid,
automatic process more akin to the judgments animals make as they
move through the world, feeling themselves drawn toward or away
from various things. Moral judgment is mostly done by the elephant.
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: 
