Moral hypocrisy: appearing moral to oneself without being so.

How can people appear moral to themselves when they fail to act morally? Two self-deception strategies were considered: (a) misperceive one's behavior as moral and (b) avoid comparing one's behavior with moral standards. In Studies 1 and 2 the authors documented the importance of the 2nd strategy but not the 1st. Among participants who flipped a coin to assign themselves and another participant "fairly" to tasks, even a clearly labeled coin that prevented misperception did not produce a fair result (Study 1). Inducing behavior-standard comparison through self-awareness did (Study 2). Study 3 qualified the self-awareness effect: When moral standards were not salient before acting, self-awareness no longer increased alignment of behavior with standards. Instead, it increased alignment of standards with behavior and produced less moral action. Overall, results showed 3 different faces of moral hypocrisy.     

Abstraction increases hypocrisy

Four studies show that an abstract view on moral issues increases moral hypocrisy. In Experiment 1, participants who were directly instructed to take a more abstract view on a moral issue judged the immoral behavior of others more severely than their own immoral behavior, but participants with a concrete view did not. Experiments 2 and 3 induced an abstract view in an indirect manner, by manipulating temporal distance toward the dilemma. In Experiment 4 abstractness was manipulated completely independent from the moral dilemma, by inducing an abstract or a concrete mindset. In all four studies, abstractness consistently increased hypocrisy. The last study also shows that the effect of abstractness on hypocrisy is mediated by the degree of moral flexibility. Together, these studies show that hypocrisy is directly determined by the focus that people have when making a moral judgment.     

The lure of hypocrisy

Why are we susceptible to hypocrisy? Four preconditions for falling prey to hypocrisy are delineated. The reasons for our complex attitude to hypocrisy, both condoning and condemning it, are also explored. Hypocrisy is the false claim to virtue. It always refers to consciously intended deception by a person in a position of trust. Making use of literary examples, the investigation starts with the delineation of three readily apparent preconditions for falling prey to hypocrisy. Idealization of the hypocrite is seen as a defense against a dread of uncertainty on the part of the person who succumbs to hypocrisy. The addition of a third precondition, the force of powerful desire, completes the introduction. A selective review of historical and philosophical studies of hypocrisy over the past twenty-five hundred years situates the problem of the susceptibility to hypocrisy. Application of psychoanalytic formulations and clinical data, principally from the study of patients whose psychoanalysts committed ethical violations, produces a fourth precondition for succumbing to hypocrisy: transference, with a regression from mature trust to a condition of unmodified basic trust.     

Homosexuality and psychoanalytic hypocrisy

The author criticizes the common practice in the national and international psychoanalytic associations of denying homosexual applicants admission to training even though all parties know full well that there are more than a few homosexual psychoanalysts within their ranks, some of whom enjoy the high professional esteem of their colleagues. The author refers to his earlier article "Homosexuality and psychoanalysis" (Psyche, 1985, 39, 750-759).     

The unfriendly agora and secular hypocrisy

This article seeks to commend Professor Trigg on his exposure of the warped thinking and policy‐making concerning religious life and its institutions in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. However, it challenges the view that the problems he has identified are best linked to deep philosophical and metaphysical positions (e.g. relativism, non‐realism and the subjectivity of values). Instead it invites a more piecemeal philosophical approach and supports the call to participate in the agora of discussion and policy‐making despite the secular hostility.     

Psychotherapy and the medical model: The hypocrisy of health insurance

Psychotherapists manifest a severe discrepancy between practice and preachment when they espouse rejection of a medical model of human problems and psychotherapyand accept health insurance for their work. When psychotherapists accept health insurance they classify their actions and their client's problems as medical or quasi-medical entities, confuse the literal and metaphoric definitions of illness and treatment, and support the medical model. Acceptance of health insurance may serve numerous functions including: symbolic legitimization of psychotherapists; monetary gain; and the obfuscation of moral/social issues. Accepting health insurance while criticizing the medical view is hypocritical and interferes with understanding human problems.     

Today's adolescent: addressing existential dread.

Adolescents, especially those who are gifted, may be susceptible to existential dread. It is suggested here that a team approach be used to implement the following solutions: (a) nourish students socially, (b) work toward acceptance of giftedness and teach methods of enhancing emotional development, (c) provide philosophical nurturance.     

Dissonance averted: Self-concept organization moderates the effect of hypocrisy on attitude change

The current work explored how self-concept representation affects how experiencing dissonance results in changing one’s attitudes in response to acknowledging hypocrisy. We found a relation between self-complexity and attitude change after admitting past hypocritical actions. Specifically, people lower in self-complexity changed their attitudes to bring them more in line with their transgressions (presumably to quell the especially strong feelings of unpleasantness resulting from their acknowledging behavior-belief discrepancies) whereas those greater in self-complexity showed more bolstering of their attitudes following hypocrisy. This relation between self-complexity and attitude change following hypocrisy was eliminated when participants were given a chance to reaffirm their sense of personal value and integrity through other means (i.e., self-affirmation). Implications for how self-concept representation may play a role in moderating a number of psychological phenomena, ranging from goal attainment to stereotype threat, are discussed.     

Attack priming and satiation in female golden hamsters: Tests of some alternatives to the aggression arousal interpretation

“Priming” a female hamster by allowing it a single attack on an intruder placed into its home cage transiently decreases the latency and increases the probability of attack on a second trial. Although we have previously argued that this priming effect reflects an increase in aggressive arousal, an alternative interpretation is that the fear elicited by placing a foreign object into the subject's home cage is reduced when it happens again on the second trial. Another interpretation is that priming is an effect of intruder novelty, i.e., the subject perceives a difference between the first and second intruders which causes it to attack the second more quickly. Experiment 1 compared the standard two trial paradigm with different intruders to trials in which (1) the first intruder was withdrawn and used again in the second trial, and (2) the intruder remained in the cage following the first attack. All intruders were pretreated with the analgesic-sedative methotrimeprazine to reduce the variability of their behavior. Neither hypothesis tested in Experiment 1 was supported, strengthening the interpretation of attack priming as a manipulation that affects primarily internal motivational mechanisms specific to aggression. Allowing a hamster to carry out a protracted series of attacks produces a “satiation” effect that is the reverse of priming, i.e., the latency of a subsequent attack is increased and its probability reduced. It is possible that the attack satiation observed in our earlier studies was not the result of processes internal to the subject, but could have been due to habituation to a particular intruder or to certain stimuli emitted by it during the protracted interaction. In Experiment 2 subjects were given three sessions of 10 successive trials using either 1 intruder presented repeatedly, 2 intruders presented alternately, or 10 different intruders presented once each. No difference among conditions was found in this study either suggesting that subject's aggressive behavior is insensitive to whatever changes may occur in intruders' behavior or other stimulus characteristics when they have been treated with methotrimeprazine. The lack of differences among test conditions in both experiments is most likely due to the efficacy of the drug in “standardizing” intruder behavior. Experiment 2 also revealed an interesting difference in two measures of attack latency. The time elapsing between intruder presentation and attack, i.e., the standard measure of latency, decreased from the first to the fourth trail; it then increased steadily over the remaining trials. The cumulative time that the subject remained in contact with the intruder prior to attack, a measure more indicative of attention to the intruder, dropped to an asymptotic value by the second trial. This difference suggests that the satiation effect may be accounted for by subjects' increasing avoidance of the intruders over trails, perhaps as a way of regualting their level of aggressive arousal.     

企业为何履行社会责任却落得“伪善”名声?——企业社会责任类型和感知品牌伪善间的关系

2015年中国300强企业慈善捐款达60.03亿元,形成鲜明对照的是,消费者对企业社会责任行为动机的质疑呈整体上升趋势。企业耗费巨资履行社会责任反遭遇感知伪善,无疑与其初衷背道而驰,而现有理论不能充分解释这一现象的原因。自Wagner等学者2009年在营销顶级期刊开启感知品牌伪善相关研究以来,学者多从社会学借鉴感知个体伪善研究中言行不一的分析框架,把企业社会责任单维化,显然不能反映由多样性利益相关者所决定的企业社会责任类型的差异性和复杂性,所以应从利益相关者视角揭示感知品牌伪善的形成机制。根据利益相关者特征划分企业社会责任类型——技术性和公共性,进而引入其中间机制——合法性理论和感知道德资产理论,最终验证企业社会责任类型的交互作用、企业社会责任类型与宣传的交互作用对感知品牌伪善的影响。考虑到企业社会责任的经济和社会双重影响,这一成果将指引企业正确履行社会责任,促进企业和社会良性互动。     

Independent alternatives

Philosophical Studies - Orthodox semantics for natural language modals give rise to two puzzles for their interactions with disjunction: Ross’s puzzle and the puzzle of free choice...     

Complex Moral Injury: Shattered Moral Assumptions

Journal of Religion and Health - An infographic model of moral injury (MI) is introduced in this conceptual paper that distinguishes the development of a worldview discrepancy-induced genus of MI,...     

The Dual Moral Self: Moral Centrality and Internal Moral Motivation

In this study, the relationship between two aspects of the moral self, moral centrality and internal moral motivation, was analyzed. It is argued that these 2 aspects are conceptually distinct but nonetheless empirically related. Based on a cross-sectional study of 205 adolescents (M age = 14.83 years, SD = 2.21 years) it was found that moral centrality and internal moral motivation, even though substantially correlated, interacted in predicting moral emotion expectancies. Even though moral centrality was unrelated to adolescents’ age it predicted a longitudinal increase in internal moral motivation over a 1-year interval. Overall, the findings call for a differentiation of moral centrality and internal moral motivation as 2 distinct but interrelated aspects of moral self-development that follow different developmental trajectories and are differentially related to age. At the same time, the study points out that adolescence may be less important for the development of the moral self than commonly assumed.