A new French study shows that washing your hands reduces feelings of guilt and generosity.
“I wash my hands of it,” said Pontius Pilate at the time of the condemnation to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. Obviously, he spoke metaphorically, but he was not that far from the truth, since researchers from Grenoble have shown that the act of washing hands lowers the level of guilt. The study published in the international journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience February 8 also shows that washing your hands leads to less altruistic behavior.
In order to establish this astonishing result, the researchers asked 65 users of a municipal library to recall and recount a bad deed committed against a friend or a member of their family. Then these users were divided into three groups: the first washes their hands, the second watches videos of a person washing their hands, and the third watches a video of someone typing on the computer.
In order to verify the impact of hand washing on individuals’ guilt, the researchers then asked the experiment participants to complete a test to measure feelings of guilt. In addition, they were informed that they could help a doctoral student by taking questionnaires on public transport to be completed and returned within three weeks.
The study shows that feelings of guilt and altruistic behavior are lower in people who washed their hands. She shows that watching a video of someone washing themselves also has an impact on our behavior: “The mere mention of washing hands, seeing someone doing it on a screen, is enough to produce this. effect ”, although in a less pronounced way than if the individual washes his hands himself, underlines Laurent Bègue, professor of social psychology at the Pierre-Mendès-France University of Grenoble. According to him, these results are explained by “the universality of the rituals of purification by water which link the physical cleanliness with the moral cleanliness”.
How to explain the link between level of guilt and generosity? “When people feel guilty about something they’ve done, they often take pro-social actions to get rid of their guilt,” say the study’s authors who conclude that “washing hands is for hygiene. , but bad for social relationships. ”
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