Practicing Against What You Preach: A Social Values Perspective on Moral Hypocrisy

There is very little extant research on moral hypocrisy. As such, there are many definitional and theoretical issues that have yet to be addressed. Thus far, there are two working definitions of moral hypocrisy: (a) the motivation to appear moral, but avoid the consequences of behaving morally and (b) the differential evaluation of one’s own versus others’ moral transgressions. There are also two working theoretical explanations: (a) people deceive themselves into thinking that their immoral behavior is actually moral by suppressing the discrepancy between their behavior and a relevant moral standard and (b) people employ valuable executive resources to suppress negative affect elicited by moral transgressions that violate our moral intuitions. What this research appears to be missing is tied to both definition and theory. Specifically, moral hypocrisy, commonly construed, involves the imposition of standards on others that one does not adhere to oneself. Therefore, investigation and theoretical explanation of moral hypocrisy should focus on the processes involved in how people advise others compared to they decide for themselves. In our study, we adapted the existing paradigm used to study moral hypocrisy to have participants either make decisions for themselves or for another participant (actually a confederate). Unfortunately—or fortunately, depending on how you look at it—we did not find moral hypocrisy with our decision data. However, our questionnaire data enabled us to tease apart some of the aspects of people’s decision processes. One of our findings in this regard provided us with a very clear explanation for why we did not find moral hypocrisy. In particular, it is seen as fair and socially appropriate to advise someone to do what is otherwise considered to be unfair and socially inappropriate when deciding for self, at least as it pertains to the particular decision situation.

Grantor dc:publisher

Wake Forest University

Year dc:date.issued

2009

Author dc:creator

• Clark, Brian

• moral hypocrisy

Language dc:language.iso

en

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/10339/14686

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:wakespace.lib.wfu.edu:10339/14686