The DOI matches its Crossref record; 2 of the 2 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Washing Away Your Sins: Threatened Morality and Physical Cleansing
Abstract
Physical cleansing has been a focal element in religious ceremonies for thousands of years. The prevalence of this practice suggests a psychological association between bodily purity and moral purity. In three studies, we explored what we call the “Macbeth effect”—that is, a threat to one's moral purity induces the need to cleanse oneself. This effect revealed itself through an increased mental accessibility of cleansing-related concepts, a greater desire for cleansing products, and a greater likelihood of taking antiseptic wipes. Furthermore, we showed that physical cleansing alleviates the upsetting consequences of unethical behavior and reduces threats to one's moral self-image. Daily hygiene routines such as washing hands, as simple and benign as they might seem, can deliver a powerful antidote to threatened morality, enabling people to truly wash away their sins.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
Tetlock, P. E., Kristel, O. V., Elson, S. B., Green, M. C., & Lerner, J. S. (2000) · Journal of Personality and Social Psychology · doi:10.1037/0022-3514.78.5.853 · Cited by 1,400
The Moral Affiliations of Disgust: A Functional MRI Study
Moll, J., de Oliveira-Souza, R., Moll, F. T., Ignácio, F. A., Bramati, I. E., Caparelli-Dáquer, E. M., & Eslinger, P. J. (2005) · Cognitive and Behavioral Neurology · doi:10.1097/01.wnn.0000152236.46475.a7 · Cited by 355
Cited by
Disgust as a disease-avoidance mechanism.
Oaten, M., Stevenson, R. J., & Case, T. I. (2009) · Psychological Bulletin · doi:10.1037/a0014823 · Cited by 1,120
Many Labs 2: Investigating variation in replicability across samples and settings
Klein, R. A., Vianello, M., Hasselman, F., Adams, B. G., Adams, R. B., Alper, S., Aveyard, M., Axt, J. R., Babalola, M. T., Bahník, Š., et al. (2018) · Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science · doi:10.1177/2515245918810225 · Cited by 944
Mirror, Mirror on my Facebook Wall: Effects of Exposure to Facebook on Self-Esteem
Gonzales, A. L., & Hancock, J. T. (2011) · Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking · doi:10.1089/cyber.2009.0411 · Cited by 946
Disgust: evolved function and structure
Tybur, J. M., Lieberman, D., Kurzban, R., & DeScioli, P. (2013) · Psychological Review · doi:10.1037/a0030778 · Cited by 810
Small Telescopes: Detectability and the Evaluation of Replication Results
Simonsohn, U. (2015) · Psychological Science · doi:10.1177/0956797614567341 · Cited by 742
Metadata
- Authors
- Zhong, C.-B., & Liljenquist, K.
- Venue
- Science
- Published
- 2006-09-08
- Volume
- 313
- Issue
- 5792
- Pages
- 1451-1452
- ISSN
- 0036-8075 (ISSN-L)
- 1095-9203
- OpenAlex
- W2145199837
- Cited by
- 1,169
- References
- 2
- FWCI
- 9.67
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Washing Away Your Sins: Threatened Morality and Physical Cleansing. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1126/science.1130726
- The paper
- Zhong, C.-B., & Liljenquist, K. (2006). Washing Away Your Sins: Threatened Morality and Physical Cleansing. Science. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1130726
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
