Cleanliness Next to Godliness, Smell-wise

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Want a solution to corruption from the Karzai government? How about citrus-scented Windex?

Okay, so it probably won’t clean up third-world kleptocracies, but clean scents do seem to make people more moral, according to a new study (PDF) out of Brigham Young University.

Here’s how the experiment worked, according to the ScienceDaily write-up:

Participants engaged in several tasks, the only difference being that some worked in unscented rooms, while others worked in rooms freshly spritzed with Windex.

The first experiment evaluated fairness.

As a test of whether clean scents would enhance reciprocity, participants played a classic “trust game.” Subjects received $12 of real money (allegedly sent by an anonymous partner in another room). They had to decide how much of it to either keep or return to their partners who had trusted them to divide it fairly. Subjects in clean-scented rooms were less likely to exploit the trust of their partners, returning a significantly higher share of the money.

• The average amount of cash given back by the people in the “normal” room was $2.81. But the people in the clean-scented room gave back an average of $5.33.

The second experiment evaluated whether clean scents would encourage charitable behavior.

Subjects indicated their interest in volunteering with a campus organization for a Habitat for Humanity service project and their interest in donating funds to the cause.

• Participants surveyed in a Windex-ed room were significantly more interested in volunteering (4.21 on a 7-point scale) than those in a normal room (3.29).
• 22 percent of Windex-ed room participants said they’d like to donate money, compared to only 6 percent of those in a normal room.

Follow-up questions confirmed that participants didn’t notice the scent in the room and that their mood at the time of the experiment didn’t affect the outcomes.

Propaganda for Windex? More like further data on the theory of embodied cognition, which we recently discussed as the idea that physical metaphors are intimately linked to how we understand more abstract concepts, such as something being serious or heavy, or a person being emotionally warm or cold.

This smell-morality research, in fact, comes from the same team that demonstrated a link between committing immoral acts and a desire to be physically clean (which Not Exactly Rocket Science called the Lady Macbeth Effect).

While I’m mostly joking about the Karzai government thing, the researchers do think this research might have implications in retail and corporate settings — where scent could be used as a relatively unobtrusive intervention to promote more ethical behavior and discourage unethical behavior. They also point to research showing that visual cues of cleanliness promote more moral behavior, a concept you might recognize as related to the idea of “broken-windows” urban policing.

Order promotes order and cleanliness promotes cleanliness — physically and psychologically.