The Color of Sin: White and Black And Perceptual Symbols of Moral Purity and Pollution.

Sherman and Clore (2009) aimed to look at aimed to look at three different conditions involving moral and immoral words appearing in either black or white. They also wanted to see if the time taken to name a colour differs when it black which connects to immorality or in white which relates to morality. In addition to this they added in 2 conditions which took place before naming the colours. They used a series of metaphors in order to explain many of their concepts. Their first study was based on an experiment done by Meier et al (2004) using the Stroop colour- word task (1935). They used the same words and found that immorality-blackness associations operate quickly and automatically. These associations influenced performance on the Stroop task, so a task that requires identifying colours does not require any moral evaluation and can be performed quickly.

The second study was the same as the first but used a new set of words, in order to test whether the moral Stroop effect is susceptible to conditions that make immorality more prominent, this was similar to a study by Zhong and Liljenquist (2006). Alongside this task another small task was introduced where they had to read a story which either had a morally wrong or right answer. After analysis of the results they found that people, who showed no Stroop effect initially, were affected by simply being exposed to unethical behaviour, so they started to associate colour with the morally relevant words. However participants who had shown the Stroop effect at first, decreased this time round, which suggests that over exposure to immoral activities may stop the activation of ideas related to cleanliness.

Their final study looked at the general idea of people associating sin with blackness reflects in their concern with its polluting powers, then people who make such associations should be those who are generally concerned with purity and pollution. According to Zhong & Liljenquist (2006) purity concerns can manifest an individual in the form of a desire for physical cleansing. So this study assessed participants liking of 10 various products including 5 cleaning products. The prediction was made those participants who find cleaning products desirable would show the moral Stroop effect. Analysis of the results showed that individuals who showed the moral Stroop effect considered the cleaning products to be more highly desirable, so this suggests a direct link between immorality-blackness associations and purity concerns. Before any analysis was done on the results, the reaction time of the participants was readjusted so that anything below 300 mili seconds was rounded up to 300 mili seconds.

This paper has provided profound research in this area of research however it has not used a very large number of participants for each study, so the results cannot be generalised to the general public as the sample does not consist of a large sample. Also the race pool is limited, and has a lot of Caucasian people, so the results do not include an equal amount of people from all races to be able to conclude to the general population. For that reason further research should be done in this area using a lot more people from different races to enable the results to be generalised.
In addition, this study does not try and account for where this behaviour and attitude towards colour comes from. They just state that there is a difference in the way black and white words are perceived, they provide no information towards whether it is nurture or nature that brings about this attitude. A study by Stabler & Johnson (1972) conducted an experiment using children from Louisiana and Georgia, USA. The children had been asked to guess the contents of the white and black boxes, which were the same other than different colour. It was found that both white and black children associated good objects with a white box and bad objects with a black box. So this part of the study can be used to show that this sort of behaviour is due to nurture and is learnt at an early age. However this study only looks at children, so the results cannot be used to fully explain adult’s behaviour.
Stabler et al (1972) did an observational study in a more naturalistic setting of school playgrounds, where children were filmed as they were asked to destroy black and white bobo dolls and cardboard boxes. White targets were hit by the black children first; however, other observations were consistent with the earlier findings that black was considered to be worse. These results suggest that children’s attitude towards black and white will most probably generalise and influence their attitudes towards black and white people; such studies may provide light to understanding the development of racial attitudes. So this part of the study can be used to support one of the claims made by Sherman et al (2009), where they simplified their findings to say it can used to explain racial prejudice. Therefore Sherman and Clore`s (2009) study is reliable, as research is consistent with previous findings.
Furthermore their use of the colours black and white referring to either moral or immoral is supported by a study by Adams & Osgood (1973), who did a cross-cultural study across 23 cultures to reveal similarities in feelings about colours. They found that black was associated with bad and white was associated with good; their results consisted of many more colours being related to feelings. Eighty-nine previous studies of colour were also analysed and showed that generally all the results had a high correlation. This showed that there is a strong universal trend in the attribution of influence in the colour domain.
Overall, this study does not provide an apparent understanding in this subject area, due to the results section not being very clear, therefore not being able to provide a clear understanding of their findings in terms of the empirical side. Also much of their work is not generalisable because they have not used participants from a wide range of races, age group and gender. Consequently a lot more further research would have to be conducted in this area in order to make the results more valid and reliable. On the whole, after looking at all the positive and negative criticisms of this paper, it can be concluded that this paper has many flaw which need to be worked on in order to enhance reliability and validity. In addition to this, the article in general needs to be worked on and improved on how it is written, so that readers are able to identify with the concept and purpose of the study more easily.

References

Adams, F.M., & Osgood, C.E. (1973). A cross-cultural study of the affective meanings of color. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 4, 135–156.

Meier, B.P., Robinson, M.D., & Clore, G.L. (2004). Why good guys wear white: Automatic inferences about stimulus valence based on brightness. Psychological Science, 15, 82–87.

Rozin, P., & Royzman, E.B. (2001). Negativity bias, negativity dominance, and contagion.
Personality and Social Psychology Review, 5, 296–320.

Stabler, J.R., & Johnson, E.E. (1972). The meaning of black and white to children. International Journal of Symbology, 3, 11–21.

Stabler, J.R., Zeig, J.A & Rembold, A.B. (1976). Children's evaluation of the colors black and white and their interracial play behavior. Child Study Journal, 6(4), 191-197.

Stroop, J.R. (1935). Studies of interference in serial verbal reactions. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 18, 643–662.

Zhong, C., & Liljenquist, K.A. (2006). Washing away your sins: Threatened morality and physical cleansing. Science, 313, 1451– 1452.