When Values and Behavior Conflict: Moral Pluralism and Intrapersonal Moral Hypocrisy

Abstract

The authors review the various ways moral hypocrisy has been defined and operationalized by social psychologists, concentrating on three general types: moral duplicity, moral double standards, and moral weakness. While most approaches have treated moral hypocrisy as an interpersonal phenomenon, requiring public claims, preaching (versus practicing), or judgments of others (versus oneself), this paper also considers intrapersonal moral hypocrisy – that is, conflicts between values and behavior that may exist even in the absence of public pronouncements or judgments. Current attempts to understand and combat intrapersonal moral hypocrisy are aided by moral pluralism, the idea that there are many different moral values, which may come into conflict both between and within individuals. Examples are given to illustrate how taking into account individual differences in values can help to reduce moral hypocrisy. The authors close by considering the possibility that in a pluralistic world, reducing intrapersonal moral hypocrisy might not always be a normatively desired end goal.

Modeling Morality in 3‐D: Decision‐Making, Judgment, and Inference

“…Moral hypocrisy occurs when people hold themselves to different moral standards than others, and it likely reflects a motivation to appear moral while behaving selfishly (Batson et al, 1997;Gino et al, 2016;Graham et al, 2015;Jordan, Sommers, Bloom, & Rand, 2017;Sharma et al, 2014;Szabados & Soifer, 2004). Researchers have operationalized hypocrisy in two complementary ways.…”

“…Thereafter, we describe how this approach may be able to illuminate the nature of complex moral phenomena that lie at the boundary of two areas of moral cognition: person-centered morality (Alicke, Mandel, Hilton, Gerstenberg, & Lagnado, 2015;Knobe, 2010;Tannenbaum, Uhlmann, & Diermeier, 2011;Uhlmann, Pizarro, & Diermeier, 2015), moral hypocrisy (Batson, Kobrynowicz, Dinnerstein, Kampf, & Wilson, 1997;Gino, Norton, & Weber, 2016;Graham, Meindl, Koleva, Iyer, & Johnson, 2015;Sharma, Mazar, Alter, & Ariely, 2014;Szabados & Soifer, 2004), and moral influence (Bandura, 1969;Cialdini & Goldstein, 2004;Hoffman, 1970;Gino, Ayal, & Ariely, 2009;Macaulay & Berkowitz, 1970;Staub, 1971). Although the illustrative examples provided in this paper are specific to just one domain of morality (i.e., harm), the approach we describe can potentially be applied to other moral domains as well.…”

Morality and Self-Control: How They Are Intertwined and Where They Differ

“…To this we would reply that, since people do have moral thoughts and do use morally-relevant terms, self-control researchers should, instead, take the phenomenon of moralization seriously and scrutinize both its roots and its possible effects on the self-control process towards a better descriptive understanding of the phenomenon at hand 4. Another, separable core moral principle may be Honesty (i.e., "don't lie or bend the truth";Graham, Meindl, Koleva, Iyer, & Johnson, 2015;Hofmann et al, 2014).…”

The cognitive and cultural foundations of moral behavior

“…However, there are a few critical outstanding issues that make this view difficult to endorse with a confidence borne out by direct empirical evidence. First, it is not immediately obvious that individuals' and groups' moral prescriptions actually influence the behavior of those who espouse them (e.g., Graham et al, 2015;Haidt, 2001;Perry, 2017;Smith et al, 2013). When moral prescriptions and behavior are consistent with each other, moral prescriptions might simply be rationalizations of behavior rather than causes (e.g., Baumard, 2016;Haidt, 2001).…”