The Deceptiveness of Sin — Deeper Than You Thought

Simon M. Lahama, Adam L. Alterb, and Geof­frey P. Good­winc report a sur­pris­ing result in “Easy on the mind, easy on the wrong­do­er: Dis­crepant­ly flu­ent vio­la­tions are deemed less moral­ly wrong” Cog­ni­tion, Vol­ume 112, Issue 3, Sep­tem­ber 2009, pages 462–466.

From the paper:

Par­tic­i­pants com­plet­ed a ques­tion­naire in which they read six vignettes describ­ing var­i­ous moral vio­la­tions: ‘Punch’ (one man punch­es anoth­er in a bar), ‘Flag’ (teacher burns Aus­tralian flag in class), ‘Dog’ (fam­i­ly eats its dead dog), ‘Deface’ (man defaces a memo­r­i­al), ‘Hitler’ (man taunts Jew­ish sports fans with Hitler imi­ta­tion), ‘Kiss’ (broth­er and sis­ter kiss pas­sion­ate­ly).

Each of the par­tic­i­pants read three of the sto­ries in an easy-to-read for­mat and the oth­er three in a hard­er-to-read for­mat.

In the words of the authors:

…dis­crepant per­cep­tu­al flu­en­cy decreased per­cep­tions of wrong­ness com­pared to dis­crepant dis­flu­en­cy. Fur­ther, and con­sis­tent with effects of dis­crepant flu­en­cy on truth judg­ments (Hansen et al., 2008), it seems that this dif­fer­ence is account­ed for by flu­ent pro­cess­ing decreas­ing, rather than dis­flu­ent pro­cess­ing increas­ing, per­cep­tions of wrong­ness.

In nor­mal Eng­lish: peo­ple thought that immoral choic­es were less seri­ous when they were easy to read about. In the­o­log­i­cal terms, they excused sin because of how good it looked (or more pre­cise­ly based upon how easy it was to under­stand). Appar­ent­ly clean­li­ness is next to god­li­ness (or at least leg­i­bil­i­ty is next to liv­ing right).

So the next time you have some­thing to con­fess, be sure to print it on nice paper and use a laser print­er. It just might give you the edge you need.

The heart is deceit­ful above all things and beyond cure. Who can under­stand it? (Jer 17:9)