Would You Wear a Murderer's Sweater?

There's a number of oddball weird things that are just kind of "neat" about people. Things like, have you ever stood in a doorway and tried raising your arms against the doorjambs? You stand there, holding your arms upwards against the frame, knowing that it won't work. Keep trying and keep trying for about a minute to move your arms upwards against these immovable objects. Then relax, and your arms will rise on their own. Weird, huh?

Or the phenomena for amputees where they feel "phantom limbs" in place of their lost limbs, feeling sensations and pain where there's obviously nothing there.

I was listening to an old podcast of the Skeptics Guide to the Universe and they interviewed author Bruce Hood about his book Supersense. I of course haven't read the book, I put it into my Amazon list of things I'd like to read, but this was about some points he brought up that got me to thinking about some odd phenomena about people.

I might be paraphrasing a bit here, but the gist was thus: he said that one of the things he does is go in to a lecture with an old secondhand sweater. He asks the people who would be willing to wear it. Most people raise their hand. He offers them twenty bucks to put it on and even more are willing. Then he says that the sweater belonged to a serial killer, like Dahmer. Instantly hands all shoot down. Why?

He said the fascinating part to him was that it happened almost immediately, before there was any rational thought behind it. We seem to be hard-wired to think that we'll become "tainted" by association, as if somehow that sweater will impart some essence of a murder or dysfunction into us by just touching it.

Would you be willing to have an organ implanted in you if it came from a murderer? There are many people who seem to think that this will impart some part of the donor's personality. There are people who will freak out at the thought of a heart from a murderer being put into them, despite the fact that it's just a heart. No neurological tissue whatsoever, no rational reason to not do it, especially when you are in the market for a heart.

Why do we have these reactions? Or more interesting to me, what happens when you don't do the "norm"?

My wife has accused me of playing the Asperger's card too often, but I think that rewiring in the head does have some interesting side effects such as the fact that when he was talking about the sweater experiment I never thought that I wouldn't do it. Especially for twenty bucks. No second thoughts that I detected in my flow of thoughts; he did say that sometimes people will profess to still go with the "rational" reasoning but brain scans show that there's still a conflict, however momentary.

I'm not entirely off the scale though. I looked online at the table of contents. One of the bits from the book asked the question, to paraphrase, "If I offered to switch your ring or childhood toy still in your possession with an exact duplicate, would you do it?" There's no reason, rationally, not to do it if it is a precise duplicate. The thing is we have some kind of emotional attachment to sentimentality. It's not the same thing that was with us at the ceremony or during our childhood memories. We always know it's a duplicate.

But then I think this has already been philosophically dealt with when talking about the fictitious Star Trek transporter; you're broken down into an energy stream and reconstructed on the other side, your destination. Is that a duplicate of yourself? Or is it the actual you? You ceased to exist for a few moments; are you dead? In between? Is a frequent transporter traveler a copy of a copy of a copy, with the previous versions being killed?

Some things have neat scientific explanations, like the arms rising on their own experiment. Others aren't quite explained, like people's seemingly hardwired reaction towards wearing the murderer's sweater (or reaction to people who would still do it). Still other "neat" things are thought experiments that may not have a straightforward answer outside of philosophy like the transporter question.

Any thoughts on these phenomena? Or do you have some random curiosities that you puzzle over?