Kittens and Clean Hands and Sin

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Here’s an odd one:

Matthew is playing with his new kitten late one night. He is wearing only his boxer shorts, and the kitten sometimes walks over his genitals. Eventually, this arouses him, and he begins to rub his bare genitals along the kitten’s body. The kitten purrs, and seems to enjoy the contact. How wrong is it for Matthew to be rubbing himself against the kitten?

Oh, Matthew. Leave that poor kitten alone.

No, this isn’t a selection from Penthouse Letters: Household Pets Gone Wild. It’s a scientific experiment. About morality. For real.

The cat question was one of several (others included: finding a lost wallet and taking the money, sleeping with your cousin, eating a dog that’s been hit by a car) asked of subjects, who were then asked to rate the morality of the proposed act on a scale from 1 (extremely immoral) to 7 (perfectly okay). These questions were asked in a variety of situations: next to a trash can with a disgusting smell, next to a trash can with no smell, after watching a disgusting movie, after washing one’s hands, etc.

The idea was to test whether people’s moral judgments could be affected by seemingly unrelated cues in their environments.

The answer: yes.

Basically, people rated acts as more immoral if they’d been primed for disgust. They rated acts as less immoral if they’d been primed with thoughts of purity.

A reason why various genocidal tyrants have been clean freaks? A good reason to distrust doctors? A good reason to trust garbage men?

But, really, no matter how many times you’ve cleaned your hands, remember: Ceiling Cat is watching.