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The simple act of hand-washing has been shown to help clear a guilty conscience and even make you more forgiving of the moral mi

admin2022-11-05  49
问题     The simple act of hand-washing has been shown to help clear a guilty conscience and even make you more forgiving of the moral mistakes of others. It’s known as the Macbeth principle of morality: we make a fundamental, psychological association between physical purity and moral purity, which lets us literally wash away our sins. The trick even works in the opposite direction, with cleanliness prompting moral behavior in one study, people exposed to a clean-smelling environment were induced to act more fairly and charitably toward strangers than people in a neutral-smelling place.
    Now a new study published in Science asks whether hand-washing can wipe the slate clean of any past behavior—even everyday decisions, like, say, choosing Paris over Rome for vacation. When people make choices, especially between two similarly attractive options, they tend to go to great lengths to justify them as psychological assurance they’ve made the right decision.
    The mental exercise reduces post-decisional doubt and the authors of the new study found that handwashing eliminated people’s need to do it. As part of an alleged consumer survey, 40 undergraduates browsed 30 CD covers as if they were in a music store. They selected 10 CDs they would like to own and ranked them by preference. Later, the experimenter offered them a choice between their fifth- and sixth-ranked CDs as a token of appreciation from the sponsor. After the choice, participants completed an seemingly unrelated product survey that asked for evaluations of a liquid soap; half merely examined the bottle before answering, whereas others tested the soap by washing their hands. After a filler task, participants ranked the 10 CDs again.
    "People who merely examined the soap bottle dealt with their doubts about their decision by changing how they saw the CDs: as in hundreds of earlier studies, once they had made a choice, they saw the chosen CD as much more attractive than before, and the rejected CD as much less attractive," said study co-author Norbert Schwarz, a psychologist at University of Michigan. "But hand-washing eliminated this classic effect. Once participants had washed their hands, they no longer needed to justify their choice when they ranked the CDs the second time around."
    The researchers repeated the experiment, this time asking participants to rank the desirability of four kinds of fruit jam. Once again, volunteers who wiped their hands clean after choosing showed the kind of satisfaction with their decision that the non-wipers lacked. Still, there’s no guarantee that a bout of handwashing will avoid post-decision regret in the long run. As far as those big decisions go, however, you’re probably best off engaging in good old-fashioned justification.
The new study shows that hand-washing after a decision ________.
选项 A、shortens people’s mental exercise
B、enables people to make wiser decisions
C、leads to post-decisional anxiety
D、makes mental assurance needless
答案D
解析 根据题干中的The new study可定位到文章第二、第三段。由第二段第二句及第三段第一句可知，当需要作出选择，作为心理确认，人们往往会努力证明自己作出的选择是正确的，这种内心活动能减少做决定后内心的疑虑，而这项新研究报告的作者发现，洗手能使人免去这种内心活动。也就是说，洗手后人们可以不用为自己的决定寻找心理安慰，故选D项。根据第三段第一句，这种内心活动能减少做决定后内心的疑虑，而洗手能使人eliminated“免去”这种内心活动，A项中的shortens“缩短”错误。洗手使人们不必再继续纠结自己的选择是否正确，故C项中的leads to“导致”错误，而洗手并不能使人们做出更明智的决定，故B项错误。
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