Vice And Virtue, By The Victuals

The woman in the television commercial stands before St. Peter at the Pearly Gates. She’s led a virtuous life, the woman tells God’s gatekeeper.

“Virtuous?” thunders St. Peter. “Roll the tape.” And there she is, caught in flagrante delicto, munching buttered popcorn.

A man in another ad sits in a noisy restaurant and orders a sandwich … on white bread. All conversation ceases.

The diners glare at him until he explains that it’s vitamin-fortified white bread.

And then there’s that commercial for oatmeal that earnestly counseled viewers, “It’s the right thing to do.”

Indeed it is - at least for advertisers, who are exploiting what some social scientists argue is the growing tendency of health-conscious, body-obsessed Americans to make moral judgments about others simply based on the foods they eat.

In fact, two researchers at Arizona State University have discovered that people who ate the “wrong” foods were significantly more likely to be viewed by others as unethical, immoral, inconsiderate and intolerant than those who ate “right.”

Their conclusions come from a study of 290 college students who were given written descriptions of men and women who were identical, except for the types of food they ate.

Some were described as eating healthy foods: fruit, salad, whole-wheat bread, chicken and potatoes. Others were described as eating unhealthy foods such as steak, hamburgers, french fries, doughnuts, and double-fudge sundaes, said Richard Stein, an ASU doctoral student who studied the moral overtones of food with associate professor of psychology Carol Nemeroff.

Both the good and bad eaters were described as runners or tennis players in good shape and of exactly average height and weight. These facts nothwithstanding, doughnut eaters et al were still viewed as less fit and less active than those who ate healthy food, Stein said.

Why do people seem to pass moral judgments on the basis of what others eat? These and other researchers suspect that, in a very “concrete, magical sense,” many people really believe you are what you eat - and that eating bad things infects you with the food’s bad “essence,” Stein and Nemeroff wrote in the latest issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

In an earlier study, Nemeroff told one group of test subjects that a fictitious tribe ate marine turtles and another group that this tribe ate wild boars. “Boar eaters were rated as having more boar-like qualities (e.g., good runners, heavyset); turtle eaters were rated as having more turtlelike qualities (e.g., good swimmers, longlived). … The implication for moral contagion is clear,” the researchers concluded.

Then there’s the Puritan Ethic, which might suggest anything that gives easy pleasure (cheesecake) is morally wrong while things that do not (broccoli) are morally right.

In fact, Stein said they found that people who ate bad foods were viewed in distinctly Puritan ways as less disciplined and lazier than those who ate right.

Macabre math: shooting, dying by the numbers

There’s still a slightly better chance that you’ll shoot yourself than be shot by someone else.

In 1991, the last year for which data are available, 48 percent of the 38,300 firearm deaths were suicides while 47 percent were homicides. The remainder either accidental deaths or undetermined.

Not that any of this is cause for cheer, but “if a randomly chosen person adds up the probabilities that each of the 5 1/2 billion other people in the world will kill her, the sum, even in this violence-prone society … is still less than the probability that she’ll kill herself,” writes Temple University math maven John Allen Paulos in his latest book, “A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper.”

Richard Morin’s Unconventional Widsom appears Sundays on the IN Life People page.