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Clean smells promote ethical behaviour

Cleanliness is next to godliness, so goes an old adage, which has now been borne out by a new study.

People in clean smelling environments show striking improvement in ethical behaviour, which has implications for offices and organisations relying on traditional surveillance measures to enforce rules.

”Companies often employ heavy-handed interventions to regulate conduct, but they can be costly or oppressive,” said Katie Liljenquist, who led the study.

”This is a very simple, unobtrusive way to promote ethical behaviour,” added Katie, assistant professor of organisational leadership at Brigham Young University (BYU) Marriott School of Management.

Perhaps the findings could be applied at home, too, Liljenquist said with a smile. “Could be that getting our kids to clean up their rooms might help them clean up their acts, too.”

The study was unusually simple and conclusive. Participants engaged in several tasks, the only difference being that some worked in unscented rooms, while others worked in rooms freshly spritzed with Windex.

The first experiment evaluated fairness. As a test of whether clean scents would enhance reciprocity, participants played a classic “trust game.”

Subjects received $12 of real money (allegedly sent by an anonymous partner in another room). They had to decide how much of it to either keep or return to their partners who had trusted them to divide it fairly.

Subjects in clean-scented rooms were less likely to exploit the trust of their partners, returning a significantly higher share of the money.

The average amount of cash given back by the people in the “normal” room was $2.81. But the people in the clean-scented room gave back an average of $5.33.

The second experiment evaluated whether clean scents would encourage charitable behaviour. Subjects indicated their interest in volunteering with a campus organisation for a Habitat for Humanity service project and their interest in donating funds to the cause.

Participants surveyed in a Windex-ed room were significantly more interested in volunteering (4.21 on a 7-point scale) than those in a normal room (3.29).

Follow-up questions confirmed that participants didn’t notice the scent in the room and that their mood at the time of the experiment didn’t affect the outcomes.