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ABSTRACTS

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Moral Inconsistency

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We review a program of research examining three questions. First, why is the morality of people’s behavior inconsistent across time and situations? We point to people’s ability to convince themselves they have a license to sin, and we demonstrate various ways people use their behavioral history and others – individuals, groups, and society – to feel licensed. Second, why are people’s moral judgments of others’ behavior inconsistent? We highlight three factors: motivation, imagination, and repetition. Third, when do people tolerate others who fail to practice what they preach? We argue that people only condemn others’ inconsistency as hypocrisy if they think the others are enjoying an “undeserved moral benefit.” Altogether, this program of research suggests that people are surprisingly willing to enact and excuse inconsistency in their moral lives. We discuss how to reconcile this observation with the foundational social psychological principle that people hate inconsistency.

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Polarized Imagination: Partisanship Influences the Direction and Consequences of Counterfactual Thinking

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Four studies examine how political partisanship qualifies previously-documented regularities in people’s counterfactual thinking (N = 1,186 Democrats and Republicans). First, whereas prior work finds that people generally prefer to think about how things could have been better instead of worse (i.e., entertain counterfactuals in an upward vs. downward direction), Studies 1a–2 find that partisans are more likely to generate and endorse counterfactuals in whichever direction best aligns with their political views. Second, previous research finds that the closer someone comes to causing a negative event, the more blame that person receives; Study 3 finds that this effect is more pronounced among partisans who oppose (vs. support) a leader who “almost” caused a negative event. Thus, partisan reasoning may influence which alternatives to reality people will find most plausible, will be most likely to imagine spontaneously, and will view as sufficient grounds for blame.

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The Moral Psychology of Misinformation: Why We Excuse Dishonesty in a Post-Truth World

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Commentators say we have entered a “post-truth” era. As political lies and “fake news” flourish, citizens appear not only to believe misinformation, but also to condone misinformation they do not believe. The present article reviews recent research on three psychological factors that encourage people to condone misinformation: partisanship, imagination, and repetition. Each factor relates to a hallmark of “post-truth” society: political polarization, leaders who push “alterative facts,” and technology that amplifies disinformation. By lowering moral standards, convincing people that a lie’s “gist” is true, or dulling affective reactions, these factors not only reduce moral condemnation of misinformation, but can also amplify partisan disagreement. We discuss implications for reducing the spread of misinformation.

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From Critical to Hypocritical: Counterfactual Thinking Increases Partisan Disagreement About Media Hypocrisy

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Partisans on both sides of the political aisle complain that the mainstream media is hypocritical, but they disagree about whom that hypocrisy benefits. In the present research, we examine how counterfactual thinking contributes to this partisan disagreement about media hypocrisy. In three studies (two pre-registered, N = 1,342) of people’s reactions to media criticism of politicians, we find that people judged the media’s criticism of politicians they support as more hypocritical when they imagined whether the media would have criticized a politician from a different party for the same behavior if given the chance. Because this effect only emerged when people judged the media’s criticism of politicians they supported, and not politicians they opposed, counterfactual thinking increased partisan division in perceptions of media hypocrisy. We discuss implications for how counterfactual thinking facilitates motivated moral reasoning, contributes to bias in social judgment, and amplifies political polarization.

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It Might Become True: How Prefactual Thinking Licenses Dishonesty

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In our “post-truth” era, misinformation spreads not only because people believe falsehoods, but also because people sometimes give dishonesty a moral pass. The present research examines how the moral judgments that people form about dishonesty depend not only on what they know to be true, but also on what they imagine might become true. In six studies (N = 3,607), people judged a falsehood as less unethical to tell in the present when we randomly assigned them to entertain prefactual thoughts about how it might become true in the future. This effect emerged with participants from 59 nations judging falsehoods about consumer products, professional skills, and controversial political issues – and the effect was particularly pronounced when participants were inclined to accept that the falsehood might become true. Moreover, thinking prefactually about how a falsehood might become true made people more inclined to share the falsehood on social media. We theorized that, even when people recognize a falsehood as factually incorrect, these prefactual thoughts reduce how unethical the falsehood seems by making the broader meaning that the statement communicates, its gist, seem truer. Mediational evidence was consistent with this theorizing. We argue that prefactual thinking offers people a degree of freedom they can use to excuse lies, and we discuss implications for theories of mental simulation and moral judgment.

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The Moral Repetition Effect: Bad Deeds Seem Less Unethical When Repeatedly Encountered

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Reports of moral transgressions can “go viral” through gossip, continuous news coverage, and social media. When they do, the same person is likely to hear about the same transgression multiple times. The present research demonstrates that people will judge the same transgression less severely after repeatedly encountering an identical description of it. I present seven
experiments (six of which were pre-registered; 73,265 observations from 3,301 online participants and urban residents holding 55 nationalities). Participants rated fake-news sharing, real and hypothetical business transgressions, violations of fundamental “moral foundations,” and various everyday wrongdoings as less unethical and less deserving of punishment if they had been shown descriptions of these behaviors previously. Results suggest that affect plays an important role in this moral repetition effect. Repeated exposure to a description of a transgression reduced the negative affect that the transgression elicited, and less-negative affect meant less-harsh moral judgments. Moreover, instructing participants to base their moral judgments on reason, rather than emotion, eliminated the moral repetition effect. An alternative explanation based on perceptions of social norms received only mixed support. The results extend understanding of when and how repetition influences judgment, and they reveal a new way in which moral judgments are biased by reliance on affect. The more people that hear about a transgression, the wider moral outrage will spread; but the more times an individual hears about it, the less outraged that person may be.

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Consequences of Perceiving Organization Members as a Unified Entity: Stronger Attraction, but Greater Blame for Member Transgressions

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Are Uber drivers just a collection of independent workers, or a meaningful part of Uber’s workforce? Do the owners of Holiday Inn  franchises around the world seem more like a loosely knit group, or more like a cohesive whole? These questions examine perceptions of organization members’ entitativity, the extent to which individuals appear to comprise a single, unified entity. We propose that the public’s perception that an organization’s members are highly entitative can be a double-edged sword for the organization. On one hand, perceiving an organization’s members as highly entitative makes the public more attracted to the organization because people associate entitativity with competence. On the other hand, perceiving members as highly entitative leads the public to blame the organization and its leadership for an individual member’s wrongdoing, because the public infers that the organization and its leadership tacitly condoned the wrongdoing. Two experiments and a field survey, plus three supplemental studies, support these propositions. Moving beyond academic debates about whether theories should treat an organization as a unified entity, these results demonstrate the importance of understanding how much the public does perceive an organization as a unified entity. As the changing nature of work enables loosely-knit collections of individuals to hold membership in the same organization, entitativity perceptions may become increasingly consequential.

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Moral Credentials and the 2020 Democratic Presidential Primary: No Evidence that Endorsing Female Candidates Licenses People to Favor Men

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Endorsing Obama in 2008 licensed some Americans to favor Whites over Blacks––an example of moral self-licensing (Effron et al., 2009). Could endorsing a female presidential candidate in 2020-21 similarly license Americans to favor men at the expense of women? Two high-powered, pre-registered experiments found no evidence for this possibility. We manipulated whether Democrat participants had an opportunity to endorse a female Democratic candidate if she ran against a male candidate (i.e., Trump in Study 1, N = 2,143; an anti-Trump Republican or independent candidate in Study 2, N = 2,228). Then, participants read about a stereotypically masculine job and indicated whether they thought a man should fill it. Contrary to predictions, we found that endorsing a female Democrat did not increase participants’ tendency to favor men over women for the job. We discuss implications for the robustness and generalizability of moral self-licensing.​

 

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Disclosing Interpersonal Conflicts of Interest: Revealing Whom We Like, But Not Whom We Dislike

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Imagine your boss asks you to evaluate the work performance of a coworker whom you happen to like or dislike for reasons unrelated to the performance. This situation poses an interpersonal conflict of interest because the fact that you like or dislike the coworker could undermine your professional obligation to offer an objective evaluation. We hypothesize that people are less likely to disclose conflicts of interest that involve disliking as opposed to liking, because they worry that disclosing dislike will make them look unsociable. Nine studies (four pre-registered) – examining hypothetical, actual, and lab-simulated workplace conflicts of interest – provide supportive evidence, and cast doubt on alternative explanations based on the motivations to maintain objectivity or to get away with bias. The findings demonstrate the importance of considering interpersonal dynamics in theorizing about advice-giving and conflicts of interest. We discuss implications for detecting conflicts of interest in organizations.

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Moral Cleansing as Hypocrisy: When Private Acts of Charity Make You Feel Better than you Deserve

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What counts as hypocrisy? Current theorizing emphasizes that people see hypocrisy when an individual sends them “false signals” about his or her morality (Jordan, Sommers, Bloom, & Rand, 2017); indeed, the canonical hypocrite acts more virtuously in public than in private. An alternative theory posits that people see hypocrisy when an individual enjoys “undeserved moral benefits,” such as feeling more virtuous than his or her behavior merits, even when the individual has not sent false signals to others (Effron, O’Connor, Leroy, & Lucas, 2018). This theory predicts that acting less virtuously in public than in private can seem hypocritical by indicating that individuals have used good deeds to feel less guilty about their public sins than they should. Seven experiments (N = 3,468 representing 64 nationalities) supported this prediction. Participants read about a worker in a “sin industry” who secretly performed good deeds. When the individual’s public work (e.g., selling tobacco) was inconsistent with, versus unrelated to, the good deeds (e.g., anonymous donations to an antismoking cause vs. an antiobesity cause), participants perceived him as more hypocritical, which in turn predicted less praise for his good deeds. Participants also inferred that the individual was using the inconsistent good deeds to cleanse his conscience for his public work, and such moral cleansing appeared hypocritical when it successfully alleviated his guilt. These results broaden and deepen understanding about how lay people conceptualize hypocrisy. Hypocrisy does not require appearing more virtuous than you are; it suffices to feel more virtuous than you deserve.

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Morality and Misinformation: Encountering Fake-News Headlines Makes Them Seem Less Unethical to Publish and Share

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People may repeatedly encounter the same misinformation when it “goes viral.” Four experiments and a pilot study (two pre-registered; N = 2,587) suggest that repeatedly encountering misinformation makes it seem less unethical to spread––regardless of whether one believes it. Seeing a fake-news headline one or four times reduced how unethical participants thought it was to publish and share that headline when they saw it again – even when it was clearly labelled false and participants disbelieved it, and even after statistically accounting for judgments of how likeable and popular it was. In turn, perceiving it as less unethical predicted stronger inclinations to express approval of it online. People were also more likely to actually share repeated (vs. new) headlines in an experimental setting. We speculate that repeating blatant misinformation may reduce the moral condemnation it receives by making it feel intuitively true, and we discuss other potential mechanisms.

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An Exploratory Investigation of Americans’ Expression of Gender Bias Before and After the 2016 Presidential Election

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 Did the 2016 U.S. presidential election’s outcome affect Americans’ expression of gender bias? Drawing on theories linking leadership with intergroup attitudes, we proposed it would. A pre-registered exploratory survey of two independent samples of Americans pre- and post-election (Ns=1,098 and 1,192) showed no pre-post differences in modern sexism, concern with the gender pay gap, or perceptions of gender inequality and progress overall. However, supporters of Donald Trump (but not of Hillary Clinton) expressed greater modern sexism post- versus pre-election – which in turn predicted reporting lower disturbance with the gender pay gap, perceiving less discrimination against women but more against men, greater progress toward gender equality, and greater female representation at top levels in the U.S. Results were reliable when evaluated against four robustness standards, thereby offering suggestive evidence of how historic events may affect gender-bias expression. We discuss the theoretical implications for intergroup attitudes and their expression.

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From Inconsistency to Hypocrisy: When Does "Saying One Thing But Doing Another" Invite Condemnation?

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It is not always possible for leaders, teams, and organizations to practice what they preach. Misalignment between words and deeds can invite harsh interpersonal consequences, such as distrust and moral condemnation, which have negative knock-on effects throughout organizations. Yet the interpersonal consequences of such misalignment are not always severe, and are sometimes even positive. This paper presents a new model of when and why audiences respond negatively to those who “say one thing but do another.” We propose that audiences react negatively if they (a) perceive a high degree of misalignment (i.e., perceive low “behavioral integrity”), and (b) interpret such misalignment as a claim to an undeserved moral benefit (i.e., interpret it as hypocrisy). Our model integrates disparate research findings about factors that influence how audiences react to misalignment, and it clarifies conceptual confusion surrounding word-deed misalignment, behavioral integrity, and hypocrisy. We discuss how our model can inform unanswered questions, such as why people fail to practice what they preach despite the risk of negative consequences. Finally, we consider practical implications for leaders, proposing that anticipating and managing the consequences of misalignment will be more effective than trying to avoid it altogether.

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Group Cohesion Benefits Individuals Who Express Prejudice, But Harms Their Group

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When someone expresses prejudice against an outgroup, how negatively do we judge the prejudiced individual and his or her ingroup? Previous lines of research suggest that the answer depends on the ingroup's entitativity—i.e., how cohesive it is—but they make different predictions about whether entitativity should increase or decrease outside observers' negative reactions to prejudice. We resolve this tension by demonstrating divergent consequences of entitativity for prejudiced individuals versus their groups. Mediational and experimental data from six studies (two pre-registered; N = 2455) support two hypotheses: Entitativity increases how responsible the group seems for its member's prejudice, which in turn decreases how unacceptable observers find the member's behavior and how much they condemn her (H1), but which also increases how much they condemn the group (H2). Thus, entitativity can grant individuals a license to express prejudice but can damage their group's reputation.

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Hypocrisy and Culture: Failing to Practice What you Preach Receives Harsher Interpersonal Reactions in Independent (vs. Interdependent) Cultures

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Failing to practice what you preach is often condemned as hypocrisy in the West. Three experiments and a field survey document less negative interpersonal reactions to misalignment between practicing and preaching in cultures encouraging individuals' interdependence (Asian and Latin American) than in those encouraging independence (North American and Western Europe). In Studies 1–3, target people received greater moral condemnation for a misdeed when it contradicted the values they preached than when it did not – but this effect was smaller among participants from Indonesia, India, and Japan than among participants from the USA. In Study 4, employees from 46 nations rated their managers. Overall, the more that employees perceived a manager's words and deeds as chronically misaligned, the less they trusted him or her – but the more employees' national culture emphasized interdependence, the weaker this effect became. We posit that these cultural differences in reactions to failures to practice what one preaches arise because people are more likely to view the preaching as other-oriented and generous (vs. selfish and hypocritical) in cultural contexts that encourage interdependence. Study 2 provided meditational evidence of this possibility. We discuss implications for managing intercultural conflict, and for theories about consistency, hypocrisy, and moral judgment.

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Other People’s Money: Money’s Perceived Purchasing Power Is Smaller for Others Than for the Self

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Nine studies find that people believe their money has greater purchasing power than the same quantity of others’ money. Using a variety of products from socks to clocks to chocolates, we found that participants thought the same amount of money could buy more when it belonged to themselves versus others—a pattern that extended to undesirable products. Participants also believed their money—in the form of donations, taxes, fines, and fees—would help charities and governments more than others’ money. We tested six mechanisms based on psychological distance, the endowment effect, wishful thinking, better-than-average biases, pain of payment, and beliefs about product preferences. Only a psychological distance mechanism received support. Specifically, we found that the perceived purchasing power of other people’s money decreased logarithmically as others’ psychological distance from the self increased, consistent with psychological distance’s subadditive property. Further supporting a psychological distance mechanism, we found that framing one’s own money as distant (vs. near) reduced the self-other difference in perceived purchasing power. Our results suggest that beliefs about the value of money depend on who owns it, and we discuss implications for marketing, management, psychology, and economics.

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It Could Have Been True: How Counterfactual Thoughts Reduce Condemnation of Falsehoods and Increase Political Polarization

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This research demonstrates how counterfactual thoughts can lead people to excuse others for telling falsehoods. When a falsehood aligned with participants’ political preferences, reflecting on how it could have been true led them to judge it as less unethical to tell, which in turn led them to judge a politician who told it as having a more moral character and deserving less punishment. When a falsehood did not align with political preferences, this effect was significantly smaller and less reliable, in part because people doubted the plausibility of the relevant counterfactual thoughts. These results emerged independently in three studies (two preregistered; total N = 2,783) and in meta- and Bayesian analyses, regardless of whether participants considered the same counterfactuals or generated their own. The results reveal how counterfactual thoughts can amplify partisan differences in judgments of alleged dishonesty. I discuss implications for theories of counterfactual thinking and motivated moral reasoning.

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Do as I Say, Not as I've Done: Suffering for a Misdeed Reduces the Hypocrisy of Advising Against it

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Not everyone who has committed a misdeed and wants to warn others against committing it will feel entitled to do so. Six experiments, a replication, and a follow-up study examined how suffering for a misdeed grants people the legitimacy to advise against it. When advisors had suffered (vs. not suffered) for their misdeeds, observers thought advisors had more of a right to advise and perceived them as less hypocritical and self-righteous; advisees responded with less anger and derogation; and advisors themselves felt more comfortable offering strong advice. Advisors also strategically highlighted how they had suffered for their wrongdoing when they were motivated to establish their right to offer advice. Additional results illustrate how concerns about the legitimacy of advice-giving differ from concerns about persuasiveness. The findings shed light on what prevents good advice from being disseminated, and how to help people learn from others’ mistakes.

 

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Hypocrisy by Association: When Organizational Membership Increases Condemnation for Wrongdoing

 

Hypocrisy occurs when people fail to practice what they preach. Four experiments document the hypocrisy-by-association effect, whereby failing to practice what an organization preaches can make an employee seem hypocritical and invite moral condemnation. Participants judged employees more harshly for the same transgression when it was inconsistent with ethical values the employees’ organi- zation promoted, and ascriptions of hypocrisy mediated this effect (Studies 1–3). The results did not sup- port the possibility that inconsistent transgressions simply seemed more harmful. In Study 4, participants were less likely to select a job candidate whose transgression did (vs. did not) contradict a value pro- moted by an organization where he had once interned. The results suggest that employees are seen as morally obligated to uphold the values that their organization promotes, even by people outside of the organization. We discuss how observers will judge someone against different ethical standards depend- ing on where she or he works. 

 

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Cheating at the End to Avoid Regret

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How do people behave when they face a finite series of opportunities to cheat with little or no risk of detection? In 4 experiments and a small meta-analysis, we analyzed over 25,000 cheating opportunities faced by over 2,500 people. The results suggested that the odds of cheating are almost three times higher at the end of a series than earlier. Participants could cheat in one of two ways: They could lie about the outcome of a private coin flip to get a payoff that they would otherwise not receive (Studies 1-3) or they could overbill for their work (Study 4). We manipulated the number of cheating opportunities they expected but held the actual number of opportunities constant. The data showed that the likelihood of cheating and the extent of dishonesty were both greater when people believed that they were facing a last choice. Mediation analyses suggested that anticipatory regret about passing up a chance to enrich oneself drove this cheat-at-the-end effect. We found no support for alternative explanations based on the possibility that multiple cheating opportunities depleted people’s self-control, eroded their moral standards, or made them feel that they had earned the right to cheat. The data also suggested that the cheat- at-the-end effect may be limited to relatively short series of cheating opportunities (i.e., n < 20). Our discussion addresses the psychological and behavioral dynamics of repeated ethical choices. 

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When Virtue Leads to Villainy

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Acting virtuously can subsequently free people to act less-than-virtuously. We review recent

insights into this moral self-licensing effect: (a) It is reliable, though modestly-sized, and occurs in both real-world and laboratory contexts; (b) Planning to do good, reflecting on foregone bad deeds, or observing ingroup members’ good deeds is sufficient to license less virtuous behavior; (c) When people need a license, they can create one by strategically acting or planning to act more virtuously, exaggerating the sinfulness of foregone bad deeds, or reinterpreting past behavior as moral credentials; (d) Moral self-licensing effects seem most likely to occur when people interpret their virtuous behavior as demonstrating their lack of immorality but not signaling that morality is a core part of their self-concept. 

 

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Entitativity and Intergroup Bias: How Belonging to a Cohesive Group Allows People to Express their Prejudices

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We propose that people treat prejudice as more legitimate when it seems rationalistic—that is,

linked to a group’s pursuit of collective interests. Groups that appear to be coherent and unified wholes (entitative groups) are most likely to have such interests. We thus predicted that belonging to an entitative group licenses people to express prejudice against outgroups. Support for this idea came from three correlational studies and five experiments examining racial, national, and religious prejudice. The first four studies found that prejudice and discrimination seemed more socially acceptable to third parties when committed by members of highly entitative groups, because people could more easily explain entitative groups’ biases as a defense of collective interests. Moreover, ingroup entitativity only lent legitimacy to outgroup prejudice when an interests-based explanation was plausible—namely, when the outgroup could possibly threaten the ingroup’s interests. The last four studies found that people were more willing to express private prejudices when they perceived themselves as belonging to an entitative group. Participants’ perceptions of their own race’s entitativity were associated with a greater tendency to give explicit voice to their implicit prejudice against other races. Furthermore, experimentally raising participants’ perceptions of ingroup entitativity increased explicit expressions of outgroup prejudice, particularly among people most likely to privately harbor such prejudices (i.e., highly identified group members). Together, these findings demonstrate that entitativity can lend a veneer of legitimacy to prejudice and disinhibit its expression. We discuss implications for intergroup relations and shifting national demographics. 

 

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Making Mountains of Morality from Molehills of Virtue: Threat Causes People to Overestimate their Moral Credentials

 

Seven studies demonstrate that threats to moral identity can increase how definitively people think they have previously proven their morality. When White participants were made to worry that their future behavior could seem racist, they overestimated how much a prior decision of theirs would convince an observer of their non-prejudiced character (Studies 1a–3). Ironically, such overestimation made participants appear more prejudiced to observers (Study 4). Studies 5–6 demonstrated a similar effect of threat in the domain of charitable giving – an effect driven by individuals for whom maintaining a moral identity is particularly important. Threatened participants only enhanced their beliefs that they had proven their morality when there was at least some supporting evidence, but these beliefs were insensitive to whether the evidence was weak or strong (Study 2). Discussion considers the role of motivated reasoning, and implications for ethical decision-making and moral licensing. 

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