Summary
Moral cleansing is what people do to feel like a good person again after doing something they think wrong. Social psychologists use the term for compensating acts that restore a threatened moral self-image. In a 2015 review, Colin West and Chen-Bo Zhong sort them into three kinds: restitution, which puts the wrong right directly; behavioural cleansing, doing good in some unrelated area; and symbolic cleansing, such as ritual washing.
The best-known study is Zhong and Katie Liljenquist’s of 2006, which found that recalling unethical behaviour increased people’s desire to clean themselves, the ‘Macbeth effect’, though replications have been mixed. It differs from moral licensing, where earlier good deeds are felt to permit later bad ones.
Rationale
Unattended, Part 1 says, harmful dispositions return: “we will unconsciously replicate the destructive ones”. Moral cleansing names one route: a gesture that restores our sense of being good can stand in for change.