Pontius Pilate got his timing wrong. He should have washed his hands before releasing Jesus to his enemies – not after.
An interesting recent study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology tells us that subjects who had been asked to wash their hands, apparently for incidental reasons, made significantly harsher moral judgments when later completing an evaluation questionnaire on subjects such as pornography or littering. Complementary studies, which followed, gave the same results.
We infer that our sense of being externally clean affects our self image and so raises our moral disapproval. No doubt Pilate got some relief from washing his hands afterwards but, had he done so before, he would have been more comfortable in the first place about handing over this renegade Jew.
