Morality

Cleanliness IS next to Godliness.   

Most of know the old phrase. A quick study of religion will show many examples where moral purity is related to physical purity and cleanliness.  

In Judaism for example there is great empahsis placed on riturals of cleansing prior to entering holy states.  My favorite of these is the immersion in the Mikva (ritual bath).    

It turns out there may be some interesting psychological corrleations between the experience of cleanliness and the way that we make moral judgments.  According this article in Scientific American – after we wash our hands we are likely to judge people less harshly in moral terms. 

When people are asked to list their favorite metaphor, they typically cite great works of poetry, literature or oratory. Indeed, many metaphors are born from creative insight—Romeo likening Juliet to the rising sun or poet Robert Burns comparing his love to a red rose.

But there is more to metaphor than this.

Some metaphors are not literary creations at all—instead they seem to be built from the ground up, given to us by experience. For example, knowledge—an intangible, abstract concept—is often recast in terms of the concrete experience of sight. To know something is to see it, and so we often say that we see someone’s point or that an idea is clear. Metaphors of this sort—linking the abstract to the concrete, perceptual, and visceral—were studied systematically by the UC-Berkley cognitive linguist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson, at Brown University. 

Read the rest…. 

A brilliant talk from MIT behavioral economist Dan Ariely.  Ariely talks about how our intution so often gets things wrong and how we might learn to test our intuition.  

He then looks at the question of cheating, or what he calls the “fudge factor.”  Through a bunch of clever litte experiments Ariely demonstrates how certain things influence how much people are willing to cheat.  It turns out that he can predictably raise or lower the amount of cheating  people do in the experiments through things such as reminding them not to cheat, giving them some distance from the rewards and risks of cheating and showing them somebody from their own group that’s willing to cheat.  

I believe that Ariely’s research can be adapted into great educational programs.  When I first started teaching about the brain, I did a workshop around Josh Greene’s and John Haidt’s work on the Trolley problem.  The teens I was working with were fascinated by the implications as they related to their own sense of morality.  

I think that Ariely’s work has the potential to be turned into great experiential education for teens.  One direction that I am interested in exploring is how teens can create their own experiments/research related to mind and brain. I would like to see teens doing field research and homework related to morality. Can they find out what people thing is write and wrong among their peers and to what extent people act according to their beliefs?  Can teens be in charge of research? I think they can and they must be if we are going to keep them learning and growing.