Once they’d been sufficiently grossed out, the volunteers answered questions testing their willingness to lie and cheat in exchange for money. Across the board, the researchers found, those who had just spent their time being disgusted had fewer qualms about unethical behavior than a separate control group, who had come to the questions without first being primed.

In a separate experiments, the researchers added another step in the middle: After the volunteers went through the same repulsion-inducing activities but before they answered questions about their own ethics, they viewed pictures of products like body wash and disinfectants. Exposure to products that promoted hygiene, the researchers found, acted as a kind of palate-cleanser to the volunteers, making them no more likely to say they would cheat their way towards reward than those in the control.

The connection between disgusting surroundings and bad behavior, the researchers hypothesized, may lie in disgust’s evolutionary role as a protector emotion, one that developed to keep us far away from the things that might harm us.

“When people feel disgusted, they tend to remove themselves from a situation,” lead author Vikas Mittal, a professor of marketing at Rice’s Jones Graduate School of Business, said in a statement. “The instinct is to protect oneself. People become focused on ‘self’ and they’re less likely to think about other people.”

The study findings, he added, could be applied to the workplace, with neat spaces cultivating more ethical, team-oriented employees: “If there is less likelihood to feel disgusted, there will be a lower likelihood that people need to be self-focused and there will be a higher likelihood for people to cooperate with each other.”

As the inhabitant of a pretty messy cubicle, though, I and the other slobs of the world can take refuge in the fact that other research has punched holes in the morality-cleanliness connection. Notably, a 2008 study in the journal Psychological Science found the opposite effect, observing that disgust actually made people more lenient, not less, when it came to ethical behavior.

Researchers asked one group of volunteers to unscramble sentences containing words linked to cleanliness, like “washed,” “immaculate,” and “pristine,” and another group to do the same with sentences made from only neutral words. Afterwards, participants were asked to rank different actions of dubious morality on a scale from zero (totally fine) to nine (absolutely wrong), including taking money from a lost wallet and eating a family pet to avoid starvation. And in a separate experiment within the same study, volunteers watched the same toilet clip from Trainspotting (the gold standard, it seems, in truly disgusting sights), with half of the viewers washing their hands before entering the room. In both cases, the people who had been primed to think of hygiene and purity—the hand-washers and the people who had unscrambled cleanliness-related sentences—were more lax in their judgments of what ought to be considered immoral.

Back in Lenoir City, Tennessee, Karen Holloway had a follow-up hearing scheduled for this month, and the judge for her case has apparently suggested he might send her back to jail if the city isn’t satisfied with her yard cleanup. After all, cleanliness is next to—well, actually, the jury’s still out on that one.

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