Newsweek article on hypocrisy has relevance to animal welfare

[Guest guest]

Do as I Say, Not as I Do

Hypocrisy requires high-level thinking. In our heart and gut, we're

more moral, honest and fair.

Sharon Begley

NEWSWEEK

Updated: 2:14 PM ET Jun 14, 2008

Finding examples of moral hypocrisy is just too easy, what with Eliot

Spitzer (former New York governor, moralizing proponent of laws

against sex tourism and prostitution; named in " escort service " sting

in March) coming along just when memories of Mark Foley

(ex-congressman; crusader against child exploitation; caught in 2006

sending sexually explicit messages to congressional pages) and Sen.

Larry (family values; " wide stance " ) Craig were, mercifully, fading.

But while the ubiquity of hypocrisy can sour you on human nature,

there's a bright side: scientists have lots of examples to study as

they look for ways to make hypocrisy a little less common than

breathing.

Scientists have long bickered over whether hypocrisy is driven by

emotion or by reason-that is, by our gut instinct to cast a halo over

ourselves, or by efforts to rationalize and justify our own

transgressions. In other moral judgments, brain imaging shows,

regions involved in feeling, not thinking, rule. In " the train

dilemma, " for instance, people are asked whether they would throw a

switch to send an out-of-control train off a track where it would

kill 10 people and onto one where it would kill one. Most of us say

we would. But would we heave a large man onto the track to derail the

train and save the 10? Most of us say no: although the

save-10-lose-one calculus is identical, the emotional

component-heaving someone to his death rather than throwing an

impersonal switch-is repugnant, and the brain's emotion regions

scream " Don't! "

The role of emotion in moral judgments has upended the Enlightenment

notion that our ethical sense is based on high-minded philosophy and

cognition. That brings us to hypocrisy, which is almost ridiculously

easy to bring out in people. In a new study that will not exactly

restore your faith in human nature, psychologists David DeSteno and

Piercarlo Valdesolo of Northeastern University instructed 94 people

to assign themselves and a stranger one of two tasks: an easy one,

looking for hidden images in a photo, or a hard one, solving math and

logic problems. The participants could make the assignments

themselves, or have a computer do it randomly. Then everyone was

asked, how fairly did you act?, from " extremely unfairly " (1) to

" extremely fairly " (7). Next they watched someone else make the

assignments, and judged that person's ethics. Selflessness was a

virtual no-show: 87 out of 94 people opted for the easy task and gave

the next guy the onerous one. Hypocrisy, however, showed up with

bells on: every single person who made the selfish choice judged his

own behavior more leniently-on average, 4.5 vs. 3.1-than that of

someone else who grabbed the easy task for himself, the scientists

will report in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

The gap might not have been on a par with delivering homophobic

sermons while having a gay affair, but it suggests how that kind of

hypocrisy is possible. For one thing, people's emotions might have

gotten the better of them, just as emotions drive the runaway-train

dilemma. When we judge our own transgressions less harshly than we

judge the same transgressions in others, DeSteno said, it may be

because " we have this automatic, gut-level instinct to preserve our

self-image. In our heart, maybe we're just not as sensitive to our

own transgressions. " Adds Dan Batson of the University of Kansas, a

pioneer in hypocrisy studies, " people have learned that it pays to

seem moral, since it lets you avoid censure and guilt. But even

better is appearing moral without having to pay the cost of actually

being moral " -such as assigning yourself the tough job.

To test the role of cognition in hypocrisy, DeSteno had volunteers

again assign themselves an easy task and a stranger an onerous one.

But before judging the fairness of their actions, they had to

memorize seven numbers. This ploy keeps the brain's thinking regions

too tied up to think much about anything else, and it worked:

hypocrisy vanished. People judged their own (selfish) behavior as

harshly as they did others', strong evidence that moral hypocrisy

requires a high-order cognitive process. When the thinking part of

the brain is otherwise engaged, we're left with gut-level reactions,

and we intuitively and equally condemn bad behavior by ourselves as

well as others.

If our gut knows when we have erred and judges our transgressions

harshly, moral hypocrisy might not be as inevitable as if it were the

child of emotions and instincts, which are tougher to change than

thinking. " Since it's a cognitive process, we have volitional control

over it, " argues DeSteno. That matters because of another nasty

aspect of hypocrisy: we apply the same moral relativism when judging

the actions of people like ourselves. When " people like us " torture,

it's justified; when people unlike us do, it's an atrocity. When we

make that judgment, the brain's cognitive regions are the hypocrites;

emotional regions make honest judgments and see the heinous behavior

for what it is. As with other forms of judgment, the way to change

hearts and minds is to focus on the former: appeal to our better

angels in the brain's emotion areas, and tell circuits that are going

through cognitive contortions to excuse in ourselves what we condemn

in others to just shut up.

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/141525

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