"One of the things, too, about window shopping, is I call it desire shopping. And desire shopping helps you whet your appetite for the finest. And so, it keeps you motivated to say, "Yes, I've gotta have that!" We're upping the desire level, we're upping the comfort level."

Now you might think that normal people would be immune to the religious superstition that mere hand washing absolves you of moral responsibility. But you would be wrong. Specifically, in the same 2006 study Zhong and Liljenquist examined this replacement effect (physical cleansing replacing moral responsibility). In the study participants were again asked to recall a moral failure. Afterward, some participants were allowed to use an antiseptic wipe. After using the wipe (or not) the participants were asked to give mood ratings. Many of the mood ratings assessed moral emotions: Disgust, regret, shame, guilt. After the mood ratings the participants were asked to engage in an act of helpful volunteerism (participating for another study without pay to help out a desperate graduate student).

What did Zhong and Liljenquist find? They observed two things. First, if participants were allowed to use an antiseptic wipe they were less helpful. Where 74% of the control participants agreed to help out the graduate student only 41% of those who used a wipe agreed to assist. Second, when compared to controls those using the wipe reported fewer negative moral emotions (e.g., less shame, less guilt) after recalling their moral failure.

From Experimental Theology (where else?) Another really good recent post of his is the one called 'The Bait and Switch of Contemporary Christianity.'

    Probably no two writers agree on the defining characteristics of postmodernism. Given the numerous influences, ranging from literary theory to linguistics to studies of the practice of science, any attempt to find the underlying unifying element that defines postmodernism is doomed to elicit many cries of “But that doesn’t apply to me!” For Marvin Harris (1999b: 153), “the most prominent and important’’ aspect of postmodernism “is the disparagement of Western science and technology.” For others, the main focus is the rejection of grand theory, metanarratives, essentialism (the attribution of a priori or universal traits, such as a common human nature), and of any description of objective reality that fails to take into account the way that reality is cognitively or socially constructed. Such ideas have led to accusations that postmodernism implies a degree of relativity that renders any kind of authoritative statement impossible. It should be noted, however, that the question of relativity is a controversial one even within postmodernism.
    I would suggest that what is common to postmodernist anthropology is, first, its attention to the cognitive and the epistemological, and second, its rejectionism, both of which have many precursors in the history of anthropology. Whether or not postmodernists accept that there is a real world separate from our interpretations, they emphasize that the world is cognitively constructed differently by different peoples at different times. Culture may be interpreted as a process of negotiating meaning. This calls into question any claims of objectivity, even within the physical sciences. Indeed, modern science is only one type of human rationality, though one that has been privileged over other forms through the hegemonic globalization of Western technology, culture, and economy. Equally legitimate traditional knowledges have been marginalized or obliterated in the process. Within anthropology, all classic ethnographies that claim objectivity may be reassessed as literary texts that might tell us more about the author and his culture than about the people he or she was studying.

[...]

Postmodernism, at least in its stronger versions, picks up on this traditional rejectionist tendency within anthropology. It is unique mainly in the degree of its rejectionism. What does postmodernism reject? Specifically, it rejects all grand theory (cultural materialism, structuralism, structural-functionalism, materialist versions of Marxism), ecological and biological explanations of human behavior, all claims to objectivity in representing other cultures, hypothesis testing and other applications of the scientific method, and all essentialisms (including the attempt to find universals of human nature or of gender behavior, whether based in biology or cross-cultural regularities). Difference and complexity are favored against unifying or simplifying theories. This is a hefty load to leave by the wayside.

    The more general villains of the postmodern drama are the Enlightenment and positivism. The Enlightenment envisaged progress toward a better world as emerging from the applications of reason, science, and technology. Positivism ostensibly embraces a correspondence theory of reality; that is, there is something truly out there, separate from ourselves and our perceptions, that we can describe, at least in rough approximation, through the neutral and objective methods of science. The laws of nature can be mathematically formulated.

Neoliberalism favors the rich and, since anthropologists usually study the poor or lower middle classes, a near consensus has emerged that neoliberal adjustments undercut domestic production prices, cause unemployment, create sweatshops that utilize underpaid child and female labor, disrupt families, disempower peasants, and encourage environmental despoliation.