Moral Hypocrisy: Definition and a Demonstration

Valdesolo and Desteno (2007) studied moral hypocrisy - judging your own actions to be more moral than when another person performs the same actions in similar circumstances. They operationalized moral hypocrisy by examining differences in attributions of fairness/unfairness to the same act when it was performed by the self, dissimilar others, and similar others.

Following Batson et al. (1997), “[i]n one condition, subjects were required to distribute a resource (i.e., time and energy) to themselves and another person, and could do so either fairly (i.e., through a random allocation procedure) or unfairly (i.e., selecting the better option for themselves). They were then asked to evaluate the morality, or fairness, of their actions. In another condition, subjects viewed a confederate acting in the unfair manner, and subsequently evaluated the morality of this act.”

Valdesolo and DeSteno (2007) divided their participant pool into four groups. The first group was asked to decide whether to allocate a difficult task to themselves and an easy task to another person, or vice versa. They were given two options, to decide using a randomizer or to allocate the tasks however they wished. All allocations would be anonymous. All but 2 participants in this first group allocated the easy task to themselves and the difficult task to the other person (whom they had never met and who did not, in fact, exist).

A second group of participants was asked to watch someone else (a confederate of the experimenter) make the allocation. This confederate, like people in the first group, allocated the easy task to himself. A third group also watched a confederate make the allocation, but were told that they differed from the confederate on one trait, being an Underestimator or an Overestimator. The fourth group was told that they were similar to the confederate on one trait (being an Underestimator or an Overestimator).

All groups were asked to rate how fair the decision was (either their own or the decision of the confederates). The group that rated themselves tended to see their own actions as more fair than the group that rated the action's of a confederate. Of the two groups that rated similar and dissimilar confederates, the group that rated an arbitrarily similar confederate saw his actions as more fair than the group that rated an arbitrarily dissimilar confederate. In other words, people saw their own selfishness as more fair than another's selfishness. They also saw a dissimilar other's selfishness as less fair than a similar other's.

Source:
Valdesolo, P. and DeSteno, David (2007). Moral Hypocrisy: Social Groups and the Flexibility of Virtue. Psychological Science, 18(8):689-690 http://socialemotions.org/page5/files/Valdesolo.DeSteno.2007.pdf