The perception of essence-transfer extends to rituals to purify items viewed as spiritually contaminated, such as having Mother Teresa wear Hitler's sweater to counteract his essence.
Findings from Kramer and Block[3] show that consumers may be less willing to accept a high auction price for a teddy bear they were selling if the person buying was perceived to be of low moral quality (such as a sex offender) as opposed to high moral quality (e.g. a mother of a young child) For the backward contagion to be more effective the person should have owned it rather than mere contact.
For example, to reduce the negative contaminants on Hitler's jumper, someone of high moral quality will be needed to counteract the 'essence'.
[citation needed] Anthropologists suggested a contagion heuristic or more specifically magic thinking when traditional societies were observed doing cultural practices such as transferring a person's identity (or soul) to inanimate objects such as fingernails and hair which were seen as highly "contagious".
Hence, the contagion heuristic seems to be a pre-adaptation, that is it evolved to be beneficial to health and relationships, supporting the survival of our species, but now no longer serves a person in the current environment.
Whilst they begin to acknowledge entities as negatively contaminated, they do not understand the biological reasoning until an older age.
[8] Cultural variation plays a large role in disgust as it affects what is seen as positive or negative and hence certain societies may react to different contaminants.
The experiment explored whether Jews following the Laws of Kashrut would consume kosher foods that had been in contact or association with non-kosher entities.