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

Defining Morality: My Current Perspective

As discussed previously, the moral psychology literature often operates from a folk psychology definition of morality. This habit has always frustrated me because the folk psychology definition seems, in my experience at least, to assume that there is a single system of attitudes, judgments, and behaviors that can be perceived, studied, and labeled as "morality." Some researchers argue that morality can be divided into different domains, characterized by distinct cognitions which may vary in certain ways, from culture to culture, but that are ultimately biologically constrained. These researchers tend to look at a variety of domains, including decisions to cause death or to allocate resources. Other researchers argue that emotions (which have a cognitive component) both underly moral attitudes and judgments in different domains and motivate behaviors. Still other researchers ask participants to identify whether an attitude is "a reflection of your core moral beliefs and convictions." Still other researchers may examine morality is a dimension used in social judgments--often looking at traits like trustworthiness, honesty, and fairness that could be distinguished from warmth-related traits like friendliness.


What is immediately evident (to me at least) is that these researchers are examining potentially-related but definitely distinct objects of study. They lump attitudes, judgments, and decisions in different domains together as "moral attitudes," "moral judgments," and "morally-relevant behaviors." They do so because these domains are traditionally considered morally-relevant. However, as Shweder argues from research contrasting explicit discussions of moral and immoral domains in Hyde Park, IL and in Bhubaneswar, Orissa, India, moral domains may vary from culture to culture. This could either be because there are more domains of moral inquiry in other cultures, or because more behaviors (etc) are considered relevant to each domain. 


Notice that I am using the term "morality" but still have not defined it. This is partially because some variation on "moral," "ethical," "right" or "wrong," "good" or "evil," are commonly used in every culture that I know of (although I really need to find a citation for this). It should be noted, however, that these terms may not be equivalent. The terms ethics and morality, for example, may be used to distinguish rules that apply to individuals in certain roles from rules that apply to all individuals at all times. They may also be used to refer to rules that people would prefer that you follow from rules that you must follow. It should be noted that these are explicit distinctions, and a study of implicit associations with the terms may yield yet other similarities and distinctions. 


At this point, you might scoff. You might say, "But I can use the word in a sentence. I can talk about some things being moral and immoral. I can talk about how some things are worst than others and about how some things are better than others, morally-speaking." I can do this too. My question is, what allows us to do this? What goes on when we do this?


When I think about morality - I understand it in terms of goals - implicit and explicit. These goals are various - for pleasure, for meaning, to avoid uncertainty, to avoid social dissolution, etc. I argue that individuals may judge something--a belief, an affective reaction, a behavior--to be moral or immoral when it facilitates or hinders the achievement of goals that are defined by the approach or avoidance of states of being that are intensely positive or negative and that are, more importantly, foundational for the approach or avoidance of other goals. 

These foundational goals include, for example, the maintenance of meaning. Meaning is here defined as the experience of being able to understand and consistently react to a variety of phenomena. The pursuit of meaning is an active goal that is threatened by a) threats to the self, including threats to self-esteem, b) perceptions of randomness and the experience of uncertainty, c) threats to affiliation with others, d) threats to symbolic immortality, e.g. reminders of mortality, e) and categories of meaning-threats (and affirmations) that have not yet been clearly delineated in the social psychological literature. I should note that meaning affirmations, as well as meaning threats, should have an important role in a moral system. For example, affirming one's self-concept may lead one to be more open to otherwise threatening experiences, people arguing against one's political position, for example. 


Interestingly, in one experiment, people responded both to being primed with nonsense phrases like "bull left" and "turn-frog" and to mortality salience primes by assigning higher bail to a fictional prostitue than people who were not primed with either meaning-threat (Randles, Proulx, & Heine, 2011). I argue that this is evidence of moralization. Perhaps, in response to meaning-threat, the fictional prostitute's actions were considered even more damaging to existing moral schemas. Alternatively, in response to meaning threat, the logic of the moral schema was more appealing. If the second perspective is accurate, I could see emotions and their associated and/or constituent cognitions helping to restore meaning. Emotions provide a clear, structured, and motivating interpretation of events. However, I should note that, in response to meaning threat, explicit changes in affect are rarely reported (Randles, Proulx, & Hein, 2011). 


People, I should note, can explicitly self-regulate against negatively evaluating things--beliefs, affective reactions, behaviors--that hinder the achievement of meaning and they can also explicitly self-regulate against positively evaluating things that facilitate the achievement of meaning. This self-regulation occurs when individuals know that achieving meaning is difficult and that any attempt to achieve meaning may have only ephemeral success. Interestingly, in a situation of powerlessness and intense threat, attempts to restore meaning may be less successful, leading to a rapidly changing set of moral cognitions. An American who was being subjected to an attack by a member of al-Qa'ida, for example,  would rarely call al-Qa'ida's actions moral if those actions lead to negative outcomes. Why not? Well, salient at the time of attack might be a variety of affectively-laden goals - the preservation of one's continued existence, a need to avoid attack because of one's impression that the attack is not fair, that one is being randomly targeted rather than being punished for one's wrongdoing, or a variety of other goals. 


The attack would challenge meaning a) because a controlled environment is only positively evaluated if it allows you the possibility of achieving positive goals, b) staying alive is fundamental to the achievement of a variety of goals, c) one does not, automatically, find oneself worthy of attack if one believes that one is someone who is worthy of continued existence, worthy of being able to continue to pursue a variety of goals. If the attack continued, however, one might seek meaning by justifying the attack as moral, by imagining a future where people like you stop future attacks and punish the perpetrators, avoiding thoughts of death and imagining a reward in the afterlife, avoiding thoughts of death and focusing on being a moral person before you do die, thinking of death as an acceptable consequence of meaning-establishing positive acts, like saving the lives of others, etc. 

Does this account challenge the existing moral psychology literature? No, but it may help integrate it and may lead to new predictions. Skitka and colleagues argue that moral identity is distinct from social identity, at least for individuals in their samples. This would make a degree of sense - the moral identity may be related to aspects of self that are fundamental to the pursuit of a variety of goals, while social-identities and personal-identities may be fundamental to the pursuit of goals that are marked-as-non-moral, as varying, as not worthy of strict control. At the same time, implicit evaluations of how worthy something is of stability and of control may vary. Someone could have an implicit moral reaction but not explicitly acknowledge this reaction. 

Haidt and colleagues argue that morality is linked to emotions, emotions which contain both an affective component and a cognitive one. The cognitive component is a story about responsibility (control), the event that caused the negative or positive affect (the disruption of stability of perceptions of the environment through the mixing of categories, the loss of valued things, attack, the superiority or inferiority of other selves, establishing control and value through care), and whether one should approach or avoid the moral actor or the person he, she, etc has acted upon. Scholars of person-perception argue for that we distinguish moral from social traits - with traits like trust being moral traits and friendliness being social ones. Friendliness is a general, positively-evaluated "thing" but it has few implications for other goals. Trust, on the other hand, has implications for multiple goals. 
Harder questions would be - why do hierarchy-maintenance goals and group-boundary-maintenance goals get moralized? They may be fundamental to meaning in that they influence one's self-understanding and one's ability to understand other people.


So far, I've presented a theory. Ways to test this theory would include correlating reactions identified in the literature as "moral" with challenges to goal-pursuit that the literature has not yet performed. It would also involve establishing the motivation behind phenomena as diverse as judgments on trolley-problems and reactions to same-sex marriage with certain, specifiable goals. It also involves establishing the context-sensitive relationship among goals. If we did all that work, however, we might reach my particular goal - predicting and being able to influence cooperation and conflict in groups with diverse ways of applying the labels "moral" and "immoral," "right" and "wrong." 

Non-conformity and Counter-conformity to Group Norms - An Exploration Using Gay Marriage and a Government Apology to Australian Aborigines

Matthew Hornsey,  Louise Majkut, Deborah Terry, and Blake McKimmie's 2003 article examines the conditions under which University of Queensland students in favor of legal recognition of gay couples or in favor of a government apology to the Aborigines would act on these attitudes either publicly or privately.  They specifically analyzed the roles of moral conviction, perceived societal support, and perceived support by the rest of the student body.  They found that, in general, a strong moral basis for the attitude, perceived societal opposition, and perceived group support correlated positively with intention to act, both privately and publicly.  Interestingly, intention to act publicly was sometimes greater than intention to act privately and group support sometimes had no effect at all.  

Using Emotions to Motivate Action and Constrain Cognition - A Speculative Perspective on ACT UP's Tactics

In Gould’s Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight Against AIDS, different emotions privilege different acts of contention. Gould, for example, directly links anger to ACT UP’s use of nonviolent direct action. In Gould’s account, members of ACT UP believed that anger would inspire direct action and explicitly encouraged anger in order to sustain their own and others' participation. Gould argues that members of ACT UP embraced these tactics and the anger that inspired them because doing so provided a more effective alternative to less confrontational tactics already in use by other organizations. This anger, sustained by the emotion-work of ACT UP members, served to sustain both ACT UP and its cause.

However, as Gould discusses, emotions exist within a set of frames, including political ideology, social-normative assumptions, and identity. Throughout Gould’s account, these frames shape not only which emotions are relevant but the actions that these emotions privilege and the targets of these actions. It is not clear, however, how emotions interact with these frames—whether they reflect them, amplify them, or transform them. Underlying this ambiguity in Gould’s text is an ambiguous account of the indeterminacy of emotions. Focusing on anger and emotions that moderate the effects of anger, I will here suggest a definition of emotion as modular frame that both fits Gould’s evidence and generates a set of testable hypotheses that could render her model applicable to a range of other contentious movements.

In Gould’s account, emotions reflect existing frames and help motivate but do not restrict action. I argue that emotions both create new frames and directly cause action, although they do so in coordination with wider frames. Specifically, emotions frame personal and social goals. Emotions are intimately bound to—and may even be partially constituted by—appraisals of whether a goal can or should be achieved, how much control the actor has over goal achievement, and the actor’s ability to cope with achievement or non-achievement of these goals.

Anger, for example, tends to arise when another individual’s goals are interfering with yours, when you believe that they have control over their actions, and when you believe that you cannot tolerate (cope with) interference. This pattern tends to hold even when individuals are experiencing anger as group members rather than simply as individuals.

Last, anger, like all emotions, can be instantaneous and, to a degree, transferable. If you see an angry person, you form a theory about what they are thinking and feeling that is based on the appraisals described above. If you identify with that person, you can adopt those appraisals as your own even before you have experienced their situation for yourself.

ACT UP deliberately framed events in terms of the core narrative of anger, creating an amplifying resonance between sociopolitical beliefs and instantaneous emotion. ACT UP, for example, shifted blame for the epidemic from the gay community to the government, arguing that the gay community had responded to the virus by developing safe sex practices while government actors had callously refused to act or acted in a way that further threatened the health and safety of the gay community. Further, they made anger normative, encouraging its display and privileging demonstrations of anger over demonstrations of other, potentially frame-threatening, emotions. It was impossible to be a member of ACT UP and not feel anger, impossible to be a member of ACT UP and not see the epidemic, and actors in the epidemic, through the lens of anger.

By choosing to embrace anger (over alternatives) ACT UP members were driven to direct action. Anger involves the appraisal that another person’s actions (or your own past actions, or a group’s actions, or the actions of God or fate) are intolerable. Both nonviolent and violent resistance are possible results of anger, but an emphasis on resistance is almost assured if anger is given free reign.

Hope and anger interact when an individual or group is deciding when, where, and who to resist. Anger establishes threat and the intentionality of the offending actor, but hope provides a sense of the angry person’s agency, their ability to affect change. ACT UP managed hope, framing nonviolent direct action as the most effective action and framing other tactics as hopeless. When hope was lost, some people surrendered anger, finding numbness or renewed compassion. Numbness shifted focus to inaction, leading activists to both leave ACT UP and to resist re-involving themselves in the fight to manage the AIDS crisis. Renewed compassion shifted focus away from political activism and instead emphasized helping others to cope with the epidemic, leading former ACT UP members to volunteer to care for AIDS victims. The loss of hope also brought a redirection of anger, emphasizing the perceived failings of individual ACT UP members. This new anger, expressed as a sense of betrayal, both amplified existing divisions and spurred the emergence of new social identities.

Moralization was evident in both attitudes towards government actors and, later, attitudes toward ACT UP members. By emphasizing the intentional, negative, and intolerable actions of others, anger can, when appropriately framed, create the perception that an individual’s bad behavior reflects essential badness. It is associated with increased stereotyping, both automatic and more deliberate.

Anger however, only tends to moralize around justice and fairness, not other markers of “badness” like pollution or weakness. Interestingly, anger may not only have focused the attention of ACT UP members on justice and fairness, but may have focused governmental attention on these issues as well. When medical and scientific officials paid attention, even defensively, to ACT UP’s anger, they may have been more attentive to ACT UP’s justice and fairness frames and it is possible that a combination of anger and hope encouraged frame bridging between these officials and members of ACT UP.

References:

Chapter Two; “New Feelings and an Expanding Political Horizon After Hardwick;” “Individuals and the Social Space for Militancy.”
Gould, Deborah. “Moving Politics.” Chapter Seven; “From Despair to Activism;” “Act Up’s Antidote to Despair”
Gould, Deborah. “Moving Politics.” Introduction. “New Curves in the Emotional Turn;” “Affect, Feelings, and Emotions.”
Kuppens, Peter, Van Mechelen, Iven, Smits, Dirk J. M., and De Boeck, Paul. “The Appraisal Basis of Anger: Specificity, Necessity, and Sufficiency of Components.” Emotion. 2003:3(3). 254-269.
Mackie, Diane M., Devos, Thierry, and Smith, Eliot. “Intergroup Emotions: Explaining Offensive Action Tendencies in an Intergroup Context.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 2000. 79(4):602-616.
Smith, Eliot R., Seger, Charles R., Mackie, Diana M. “Can Emotions Be Truly Group Level? Evidence Regarding Four Conceptual Criteria.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 2007. 93(3):443.
Snow, David, Rochford, E. Burke, Worden, Steven K., Benford, Robert D. “Frame Alignment Processes, Micromobilization, and Movement Participation.” American Sociological Review, 1986. 51(4):477
Gould, Deborah. “Moving Politics.” Chapter 2; “The Affects and Emotions of Framing;” “Aids as Genocide: Linking Fear, Grief, and Anger to Action.”
Gould, Deborah. “Moving Politics.” Chapter 4; “ACT UP and a New Emotional Habitus;” “Grief into Anger.”
Gould, Deborah. “Moving Politics.” Chapter 7; “What Despair Does;” “Forbidding Despair.”
Gould, Deborah. “Moving Politics.” Chapter 6; “Moralism.”

Prejudice and Motivations to Respond Without Prejudice

Over the last three decades, the category of low-prejudiced individuals has been revealed to be a diverse one.  An individual may have low levels of explicit prejudice and high levels of implicit prejudice, low levels of explicit and implicit prejudice, or, more rarely, higher levels of explicit and low levels of implicit prejudice (Petty and Brinol, 2009).  Further, in a society where both prejudice and egalitarian goals are common, individuals may seek to avoid acting on existing prejudices (Plant and Devine, 1998).  Some individuals may do so to avoid external censure and to conform to social norms, some individuals may do so because it is personally important to them to feel nonprejudiced, other individuals may do so for a combination of internal and external reasons.  Different motivations are correlated to different self-regulation strategies and each strategy can have different effects on levels of explicit and implicit prejudice (Devine, Amodio, Harmon-Jones, & Vance, 2002) and associated behaviors towards out-group members (Butz & Plant, 2009).   The self-regulation strategies themselves may directly influence processing of messages by stigmatized sources.

Participants that score high on Plant and Devine’s Internal Motivation to Respond Without Prejudice Scale and low on their External Motivation to Respond Without Prejudice Scale demonstrate lower levels of implicit and explicit prejudice.  Plant and Devine’s Internal Motivation to Respond Without Prejudice Scale asks participants to report the extent to which they agree with the following statements:

• I attempt to act in nonprejudiced ways toward Black people because it is personally important to me.
• According to my personal values, using stereotypes about Black people is OK.
• I am personally motivated by my beliefs to be nonprejudiced toward Black people.
• Because of my personal values, I believe that using stereotypes about Black people is wrong.
• Being nonprejudiced toward Black people is important to my self-concept.

The External Motivation to Respond Without Prejudice Scale asks participants to report the extent to which they agree with the following statements:  

• Because of today's PC (politically correct) standards I try to appear nonprejudiced toward Black people.
• I try to hide any negative thoughts about Black people in order to avoid negative reactions from others. 
• If I acted prejudiced toward Black people, I would be concerned that others would be angry with me.
• I attempt to appear nonprejudiced toward Black people in order to avoid disapproval from others. 
• I try to act nonprejudiced toward Black people because of pressure from others.

Solely internal motivation to respond without prejudice (IMS) is negatively correlated with both explicit, self-reported prejudice and implicitly measured prejudice.  Interestingly, the activation of egalitarian goals is a known mediator of the negative correlation between scoring high on the IMS alone and demonstrating lower levels of implicit prejudice, suggesting that this correlation occurs at least in part because of the moment to moment efforts of research participants.  Solely external motivation to respond without prejudice (EMS) is positively correlated with both explicitly measured and implicitly measured prejudice.

Individuals high in IMS alone, high in both EMS and IMS, and solely high in EMS have distinct motivations and abilities to regulate their prejudiced attitudes.  For example, individuals high in IMS may put less effort into regulating their automatic prejudiced attitudes out of the assumption that they are already doing so, that doing so should not require great effort, or out of a conscious concern for more deliberative attitudes.  However, when Fehr and Sassenberg (2010) informed their German participants that they had demonstrated implicit prejudice towards Arabs on an IAT test, their participants high in IMS alone learned to efficiently reduce this prejudice.  Other studies have demonstrated that individuals high in IMS alone will pursue opportunities to train themselves to reduce their prejudice but will not engage this training in an effortful way until informed of failure (Plant & Devine, 2009).  This suggests that unless individuals high in IMS alone believe that they will behave in a prejudiced way, they may either a) not elaborate messages attributed to a stigmatized source or b) not notice that they are elaborating these messages in a biased way.

Taking a more careful look at the motivations underlying self-regulation of prejudiced behavior may reveal patterns of motivation that moderate motivation to elaborate.   The items of the Internal Motivation to Respond Without Prejudice Scale and the External Motivation to Respond without Prejudice Scale are correlated with another scale, created by Legault and colleagues, that describes six categories of motivation to be nonprejudiced.  Their Motivation to be Nonprejudiced Scale (MNPS) divides these motivations into the intrinsic, the integrated, the identified, the introjected, the external, and the amotivated (Legault, Green-Demers, Grant, & Chung, 2007).

Items in the intrinsic motivation category describe a motivation to act in a non-prejudiced way because it is “enjoyable or satisfying.”  Items related to intrinsic motivation on their Motivation to be Nonprejudiced Scale (MNPS) include:

• Enjoyment relating to other groups.
• Pleasure of being open-minded.
• For the joy I feel when learning about new people.
• For the interest I feel when discovering people/groups.

This measure correlates positively to the IMS at a p < .01.  It also marginally negatively correlates with the EMS.  It negatively correlates with both explicit and implicit measurements of racism and sexism (using p-values between .05 and .001).

Moving from intrinsic to external motivations for self-regulation, Legault and colleagues next describe those who demonstrate integrated regulation.  Integrated regulation “occurs when personally endorsed goals, values, and needs are fused with the self . . . that is, they align with other needs and values of the overarching value system.” Measures of this form of self-regulation include: 

• I appreciate what understanding adds to my life.
• Striving to understand others is part of who I am.
• Because I am tolerant and accepting of difference.
• Because I am an open-minded person.
• I place an importance on egalitarian beliefs.

Like the previous measures of intrinsic regulation, this measure positively correlates with the IMS at p < .001 and is marginally negatively correlated with the EMS.  It is also significantly negatively correlated with explicit measures of racism and sexism in different studies conducted by Legault and colleagues.  It is negatively correlated with scores on a Race IAT at p < .01.  

Identified regulation is defined as having “goals that are sought because they are valued or seen as important” and demonstrates similar correlations with the IMS and EMS scales as well as with implicit and explicit measures of prejudice.  Its items include:

• Because I value nonprejudice.
• Because I admire people who are egalitarian.
• I place an importance on egalitarian beliefs.
• Because tolerance is important to me. 

It is also possible that identified individuals may exhibit a moral credentialing effect, feeling less-motivated to control prejudice if they feel that they normally act without prejudice.  Moral credentialing can increase prejudiced behaviors for individuals with both internal and external motivations to respond without prejudice (Monin, 2001).

Introjected regulation is defined by “[e]xternal incentives . . . [that] have been turned inward but not truly accepts as one’s own.”  “[T]his type of self-regulation feels quite controlling.  Introjected behaviors are ego involved and performed to avoid guilt or to enhance contingent self-worth” (Legault et al., 2007).  In 2002, Devine et al. suggested that individuals that are high in both internal and external motivation to respond without prejudice would fall into the introjected category.  This statement is not supported by Legault and colleagues’ research.  Only marginal positive correlations to the IMS and EMS were found.  In addition, Legault and Green found that introjected regulation was marginally negatively correlated with implicit racial prejudice as measured by the IAT.

It is possible that their measures correspond to a different set of motivations that those held by high EMS and IMS participants.  Their measures of introjected regulation included:

• Because I feel like I should avoid prejudice.
• Because I would feel guilty if I were prejudiced.
• Because I would feel ashamed if I were prejudiced.

Monteith, Mark, and Ashburn-Nardo (2010) found that participants who were more focused on the possibility of behaving badly reported both more frequent experiences with acting in a prejudiced way and less effort to act in less-prejudiced ways in the future.

  

Describing their participants high in IMS and EMS, Plant and Devine (2009) found that, when given the opportunity to engage in training to reduce their level of prejudice, these participants put forth more effort than participants that were high in IMS alone.  In contrast, Amodio, Devine, and Harmon Jones (2008) demonstrated that participants high in both IMS and EMS are less effective at regulating implicit prejudice than individuals high in IMS alone, as measured by neural activity in response to a variety of race-based primes.  They further argue that conflict monitoring, awareness of conflict measured at the level of neural activity, accounts for these differences, with high IMS individuals being more likely to notice the conflict between a prejudiced reaction and their egalitarian values.  This research suggests that high IMS individuals are better at self-monitoring their implicit attitudes, at least in certain contexts.  Individuals high in both EMS and IMS, however, may still experience sufficient conflict to prompt prejudice-reduction strategies.

The next category on Legault and colleagues’ scale is “external regulation” (2007).  Individuals that demonstrate external regulation do so because they wish to avoid social reprimand or to earn praise.  Items in this category of the scale include:

• So that people will admire me for being tolerant.
• Because I don’t want people to think I’m narrow-minded.
• Because biased people are not well-liked.
• Because I get more respect/acceptance when I act unbiased.

Surprisingly, these measures correlated positively with both the IMS and the EMS.  The former correlates only marginally and the latter correlates when p < .01.  This category marginally correlates positively with explicit and implicit racial measures, although it correlates negatively for explicit measures of sexism.  Only one significant correlation was found.  Explicit racism and external motivation correlated at p < .05.  There is no evidence that these individuals would elaborate messages attributed to a stigmatized message author, but the lack of significant correlations with the IMS and EMS was puzzling.

It could be that high EMS participants may include individuals that would fall into Legault and colleagues’ last category, amotivated individuals. Amotivated individuals “cannot perceive a relationship between their behavior and that behavior’s subsequent outcome.” Measures include:

• I don’t know; it’s not a priority.
• I don’t know; I don’t really bother trying to avoid it. 
• I don’t know why; I think it’s pointless.
• I don’t know, it’s not very important to me.

This significantly positively correlates with explicit and implicit prejudice. It does not significantly correlate with either the IMS or the EMS, but it does show a marginal positive correlation with the EMS and a marginal negative correlation with the IMS.  

Both individuals solely high in EMS and high in both EMS and IMS are less able to regulate their implicit prejudices.  When asked to suppress their stereotypes, high EMS individuals exhibit a rebound effect and subsequent depletion of their ability to suppress stereotypes that is not experienced by high IMS individuals (Butz and Plant, 2009).   This suggests that even individuals that are high in either external or both internal and external motivation to respond without prejudice may lack the ability to do so.  

Empathy and Biased Helping

The greater a person’s empathy with an individual, the more likely he is to help that individual unfairly:

•  “In one study, participants who were encouraged to feel more empathy towards a fictitious child with a fatal illness were more likely to assign the child to receive immediate help, at the expense of other children who had been waiting for a longer time, were more needy, or had more to gain from the help (Batson et al., 1995)” (Haidt & Kesibir, 2009).

• “On a larger scale, charitable giving follows sympathy, not the number of people in need. One child who falls down a well, or who needs an unusual surgery, triggers an outpouring of donations if the case is covered on the national news (see Loewenstein and Small, 2007 for a review). Lab studies confirm the relative power of sympathy over numbers: Small, Loewenstein, and Slovic (2007) found that a charitable appeal with a single identifiable victim became less powerful when statistical information was added to the appeal. Even more surprising, Vastfjall, Peters, and Slovic (in prep) found that a charitable appeal with one identifiable victim became less effective when a second identifiable victim was added” (Haidt & Kesibir, 2009).

Stereotype-Consistent Information Increase Thought-Confidence and Leads to More Extreme Judgments

Clark et al. demonstrated one mechanism by which their participants came to have more confidence in stereotype-consistent thoughts.  Participants with greater confidence in these thoughts were more likely to use them when making judgments.  Specifically, Clark et al. examined the association of higher socioeconomic status with higher standardized test performance and lower socioeconomic status with lower performance in elementary school.  In two experiments, Clark et al. first randomly assigned participants to view the-in fact fictitious-test results of a child getting either 90% or 20% of the answers correct.   In both experiments, they then randomly assigned participants a biography indicating the child’s either higher or lower socioeconomic status.  In both experiments, Clark et al. asked participants to rate their confidence in their thoughts about the child and to recommend that the child be placed in either a gifted or a remedial program. 

Participants in the first experiment, which followed the procedure described above, tended to have more confidence in their thoughts when they learned that the higher performing child was also from a family with higher socioeconomic status or when they learned that the lower performing child was from a family with lower socioeconomic status.  Those participants also tended to makes stronger recommendations for the child’s academic future than participants who were presented with a high-performing student from a lower socioeconomic status family or vice-versa.  Clark et al.’s participants’ degree of thought confidence mediated the relationship between the stereotype consistency of the information and the extremity of their judgments.  A mediating variable is a variable that helps, in statistical analysis, to account for the relationship between two other variables.  In other words, participants with greater thought confidence because they were presented with stereotype consistent information also tended to make more extreme recommendations. 

In the second experiment, some participants were randomly assigned a distraction condition.  In this condition, they were forced to carry out an additional task while reading and evaluating information about the-in fact fictitious-child.  When participants were distracted, participants were less accurate when recalling the child’s test scores.  They tended to recall the scores of a low-performing higher socioeconomic status child as being better than that child’s actual scores and they tended to recall the scores of a high-performing lower socioeconomic status child as being worst than that child’s actual scores.  Participants under the distraction condition reported less confidence in their thoughts about the child than did participants who were not distracted. Participants that were distracted by an additional task also made weaker recommendations regarding the child’s academic future as well.  However, they were more biased by socioeconomic status.  This relationship was mediated by their biased recall of the child’s test scores.  In other words, participants under distraction conditions tended to believe that children from lower socioeconomic status families or higher socioeconomic status families scored poorly or well respectively and this belief helps, in statistical analysis, to explain the fact that participants tended to recommend lower socioeconomic status students for remedial programs and higher socioeconomic status students for gifted programs.