Moral Hypocrisy

People are capable of performing unambiguously immoral acts (Darley, 1992; Staub, 1989), but appear equipped with the psychological mechanisms to relieve themselves of responsibility (Bandura, 1990, 1996). Indeed, moral hypocrisy has been conceptualized as an individual’s ability to hold a belief while acting in discord with it (Batson, Kobrynowicz, Dinnerstein, Kampf, & Wilson, 1997). An equally unsettling, and perhaps more socially relevant, type of hypocrisy could be an interpersonal phenomenon whereby individuals’ evaluations of their own moral transgressions differ substantially from their evaluations of the same transgressions enacted by others. If such hypocrisy is common, there is good reason to theorize that this asymmetric charity might extend beyond the self. Specifically, group affiliation might stand as a limit on the radius of one’s ‘‘moral circle,’’ qualifying in-group members for the same leniency that individuals apply to their own transgressions. To the extent that the group stands as an important source of self-definition, one may have an interest in protecting the sanctity of that entity. Indeed, ‘‘in-group morality’’ has been posited as a fundamental moral intuition (Haidt & Graham, in press). To examine these hypotheses, we modified a paradigm developed by Batson et al. (1997). In 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. We defined hypocrisy as the discrepancy between the fairness judgments for this same transgression when committed by the self or by the other. To determine if hypocrisy would extend beyond the self, we included two additional conditions in which subjects judged the unfair action of a confederate who was either a member of their in-group or a member of an out-group. If hypocrisy emerged in these conditions as well, it would suggest flexibility in the radial boundaries of hypocrisy as a function of the target’s affiliation with the self. Using minimal groups to demonstrate such variability would constitute themost strict and compelling test of our hypothesis, revealing the deep-seated nature of hypocrisy.