Article from The Telegraph
Powerful people more guilty of 'moral hypocrisy', study finds
People in positions of power are more judgmental and are guilty of "moral hypocrisy", according to scientists.
7:30AM GMT 30 Dec 2009
Experts say that these so-called "powerful people" also make stricter moral judgments of others - while doing exactly as they please. Professor Adam Galinsky, from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University in Illinois, said: "According to our research, power and influence can cause a severe disconnect between public judgment and private behavior, and as a result, the powerful are stricter in their judgment of others while being more lenient toward their own actions.
"The past year has been marked by a series of moral transgressions by powerful figures in political, business and celebrity circles. "And this research is especially relevant to the biggest scandals of 2009, as we look back on how private behavior often contradicted the public stance of particular individuals in power.
"For instance, we saw some politicians use public funds for private benefits while calling for smaller government, or have extramarital affairs while advocating family values.
"Similarly, we witnessed CEOs of major financial institutions accepting executive bonuses while simultaneously asking for government bail-out money on behalf of their companies."
To simulate an experience of power, the researchers assigned roles of high-power and low-power positions to a group of participants. Some were assigned the role of prime minister and others civil servant. The participants were then given moral dilemmas related to breaking traffic rules, declaring taxes, and returning a stolen bike - in order to "examine the impact of power on moral hypocrisy".
It was found that the "powerful" participants condemned the cheating of others while cheating more themselves and that high-power participants also tended to condemn over-reporting of travel expenses. But when given a chance to cheat on a dice game to win lottery tickets - played alone in the privacy of a cubicle - the powerful people reported winning a higher amount of lottery tickets than the low-power participants did.
It was also found that those assigned to high-power roles showed "significant" moral hypocrisy by more strictly judging others for speeding, dodging taxes and keeping a stolen bike, while finding it acceptable to do these things themselves. Prof Galinsky said: "Moral hypocrisy has its greatest impact among people who are legitimately powerful.
"In contrast, a further experiment demonstrated that people who don't feel personally entitled to their power are actually harder on themselves than they are on others, which is a phenomenon we call 'hypercrisy'.
"Ultimately, patterns of hypocrisy and hypercrisy perpetuate social inequality. The powerful impose rules and restraints on others while disregarding these restraints for themselves, whereas the powerless collaborate in reproducing social inequality because they don't feel the same entitlement."
Taken from New York Times
The Hypocrite in Everyone Else
MARCH 12, 2012, 11:20 PM
By ROBERT KURZBAN
The continuous stream of reports detailing inconsistencies on the part of politicians makes it hard to believe that the rest of us might be as bad as they are.
Mitt Romney called Obama’s healthcare plan “an unconscionable abuse of power,” strong language given the degree to which the plan was modeled on Romney’s own.
But few inconsistencies rankle as much as Newt Gingrich’s repeated infidelity, juxtaposed with his pious preaching of the importance of family values. In his most recent book, “A Nation Like No Other,” Gingrich writes that “the family is the cornerstone of society,” the force, he assures us, that “is most capable of inculcating the hearts and minds of children with the honesty, character, and virtue that is necessary to preserve a free republic.”
Still, before we start throwing stones, we might pause to reflect on whether we’re any better. A recent Gallup poll shows that 92% of Americans say that having an extramarital affair is morally wrong while estimates of the rate of adultery range as high as half of all married people. In other words, Gingrich is far from alone: millions of Americans break their solemn vows to remain faithful while at the same time morally condemning doing so.
Inconsistency is a deep part of human nature, and psychological research is continually unearthing the many ways in which humans are inconsistent. Subjects in psychology experiments rate others’ moral transgressions as worse than their own similar violations. In a recent set of studies, my colleagues and I found that people judge that it’s morally wrong to throw a guy with a backpack off of a footbridge to save the five poor souls on the tracks below from a runaway trolley, but most of these subjects also report that they themselves would do it if the five people on the tracks were closely related to them.
Given the common person’s inconsistencies, why does it seem that politicians are especially guilty of a particularly distasteful sort of inconsistency, hypocrisy, when they commit the very sins they loudly condemn? It is possible that they are actually more hypocritical than the rest of us, but the real reason is probably more pedestrian. To be discovered to be a hypocrite, a person needs to have been both caught in some nefarious act and, at the same time, heard morally denouncing the act in question. Cameras tend not to be pointed at the general public as frequently as cameras are pointed at the visible classes, though this is changing with the increasing number of camera-equipped phones. For the most part, our own hypocrisies are not as visible as those of politicians.
This is not to say that leaders ought not to be held to higher standards than the electorate, but our demands for consistency might be more compelling if we didn’t abandon our own moral positions so readily.
Perhaps, as Emerson says, “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.” Still, some inconsistencies do seem to merit a certain degree of reflection. If we are going to demand consistency from our leaders, they might be entitled to demand a bit more of it from us.