Clean hands, Pure heart ( Wudu anyone?)

Scholars say we should always try to keep our wadu and renew it right after it is broken.

Perhaps research agrees with that principle too. Here are findings from an interesting research study:

You don't have to take it from Pontius Pilate or Lady Macbeth. Guilty minds may really send people scurrying for the soap dish, a new study shows.

The study, published in Science, found that people who recall acting unethically are more drawn to cleansing products than those who remember behaving ethically.

Chen-Bo Zhong, who works for the Rotman School of Management at Canada's University of Toronto, and Katie Liljenquist, a graduate student at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management in Chicago, did the research.

"Daily hygiene routines such as washing hands, as simple and benign as they might seem, can deliver a powerful antidote to threatened morality, enabling people to truly wash away their sins," the researchers write.

They call the phenomenon the "Macbeth effect," after Lady Macbeth, who plotted King Duncan's murder in Shakespeare's play, Macbeth.

"Lady Macbeth's desperate obsession with trying to wash away her bloodied conscience while crying, 'Out, damned spot! Out, I say,' may not have been entirely in vain," the researchers write.