William Shakespeare has Lady Macbeth consumed with guilt after goading her husband into killing King Duncan. In a sleepwalk she tries to scrub away the imagined bloodstains from her hands while shouting “Out, damned spot!” The famous scene is used to name an effect known to psychologists, as The Economist puts it (August 1, 2009) for “people to want to clean themselves physically if they have acted unethically or even had thoughts of corrupt behaviour.”
Associations for Back and White
Language is filled with references that most people never think twice about.
“As pure as the driven snow” describes someone whose morality and honesty is beyond question. Villains, of course, are always “Blackhearted.”
Then, there’s Blackmail” and “Whitewashing.”
Plenty of pirates carried the prefix “Black” in the names – Black Jack Smatt, Black Caesar, Black Beard, and Black Bart to name a few. But at piratenet.com there’s not a single one named “White.”
In popular culture, the bad guys in cowboy films wore black hats and the good guys wore white Stetsons.
Moral Distinctions of Black and White
“Virtually every culture and religion draws a link between moral and bodily purification.” That’s Clay Risen, writing in The New York Times (December 10, 2006). His story is about research showing the disconnect between “Black” and moral purity discovered by Chen-Bo Zhong, a behavioral researcher at the University of Toronto, and Katie Liljenquist, a graduate student at Northwestern. It’s more than metaphorical.
The researchers asked their subjects to think about an unethical act they had committed and then type the details into a computer. Half were told the keyboard was dirty and were allowed to wash their hands.
“The researchers then asked all the test subjects if they would help out a desperate researcher who needed unpaid subjects for a study. Those who had washed their hands were about 50 percent less likely to volunteer.”
Zhong and Liljenquist concluded that having cleansed themselves physically with soap and water, the test subjects felt less of a need to pardon themselves for their moral lapse by volunteering.
Connection between Dirt and Black
More recently, researchers Gary Sherman and Gerald Clore of the University of Virginia have devised another test of the Lady Macbeth Effect.
Thirty-eight students were asked to state the colour of words as quickly as possible when they were presented to them. They were shown words associated with goodness such as virtuous and honesty; they were also shown words associated badness such as sin and cheat. The words might be presented in either black or white.
As they report in Psychological Science, the two researchers found that when “good” words were presented in black type it took the participants about 510 milliseconds to state the colour of the word.
As The Economist reported “when ‘good’ words were presented in black it took the participants about 510 milliseconds to state the colour of the word. When these same words were presented in white it took roughly 480 milliseconds - a significant difference. A similar effect was seen with ‘bad’ words.”
According to Dr. Clore these finding might help in understanding racial prejudice because of the apparent psychological connotations of “Black” and “White” ingrained in the minds of people.
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