Most people are adamant: They would never do it. Ever. Never
deliberately inflict pain on another person, just to obtain
information. Ever artificially inflate the value of some financial
product, just to take advantage of others’ ignorance. Certainly
never, ever become a deadbeat and accept a government
bailout.
They
speak only for themselves, of course. As for others, well, turn on
the news: shady bankers, savage interrogators and deadbeats are
everywhere.
“I remember thinking that I was just
better than other people, that I would never compromise my
principles,” said Jordan LaBouff, 25, a graduate student in Texas,
recalling a public standoff that he and other students had with
university administrators several years ago.
“Well,
they gave me this award — the administration did — and I’d sworn I
would never take anything from them. But of course there I was, up
on stage accepting it.”
In recent years, social
psychologists have begun to study what they call the
holier-than-thou effect. They have long known that people tend to
be overly optimistic about their own abilities and fortunes — to
overestimate their standing in class, their discipline, their
sincerity.
But this
self-inflating bias may be even stronger when it comes to moral
judgment, and it can greatly influence how people judge others’
actions, and ultimately their own. Culture, religious belief and
experience all help shape a person’s sense of moral standing in
relation to others, psychologists say, and new research is helping
to clarify when such feelings of superiority are helpful and when
they are self-defeating.
“The message in this work is not that
you should rid yourself of moral indignation; sometimes that’s
appropriate,” said David Dunning, a social psychologist at Cornell
University in Ithaca, N.Y. “But the point is that many types
of behavior are driven far more by the situation than by the force
of personality. What someone else did in that situation is a very
strong warning about what you yourself would do.”
One way to
test whether people live up to their virtuous self-image is to set
them up. In one study, for example, 251 Cornell students
predicted how likely they would be to buy a daffodil at Daffodil
Days, a four-day campus event to benefit the American Cancer
Society. Sure enough, 83 percent predicted that they would buy at
least one flower but that just 56 percent of their peers
would.
Five weeks later, during the event, the
researchers found that only 43 percent of the same students
actually bought a daffodil. In other experiments, researchers have
found that people similarly overestimate their willingness to do
what’s morally right, whether to give to charity, vote or cooperate
with a stranger. In the end, their less generous predictions about
peers’ behavior tend to be dead-on accurate — for themselves as
well as others in the study.
“The gap between how I think I’ll behave
and how I actually behave is a function of how well I simulate the
situation, and our simulations are guided by our intentions,” said
Nicholas Epley, a psychologist at the University of
Chicago and a co-author, with Dr. Dunning, in many of these
experiments.
“The
problem with these holier-than-thou assessments is not only that we
overestimate how we would have behaved,” Dr. Epley said. “It’s also
that we blame every crisis or scandal on failure of character — you
know, if we just fire all the immoral Wall Street bankers and
replace them with moral ones, we’ll solve the problem.”
In experiments as in life, the
holier-than-thou effect diminishes quickly when people have
actually had the experience they are judging: dubious accounting
practices will appear less shady to the person who has had to put a
good face on a failing company. And the effect is apparently less
pronounced in cultures that emphasize interdependence over
individual achievement, like China and Spain.
One
practice that can potentially temper feelings of moral superiority
is religion. All major faiths emphasize the value of being humble
and the perils of hubris. “In humility count others as better than
yourself,” St. Paul advises in his letter to the
Philippians.
Yet for some people, religion appears to
amplify the instinct to feel like a moral beacon. In a 2002 study,
researchers at Baylor University in Texas and Simpson
University in California evaluated the religious commitment of 249
students, 80 percent of whom were members of a church.
The researchers, led by Wade C. Rowatt
of Baylor, found that the students in this highly religious group
considered themselves, on average, almost twice as likely as their
peers to adhere to such biblical commandments as “Love your
neighbor as yourself.”
The study also found that the most
strictly fundamentalist of the students were at the highest end of
the scale.
“It reminds me of one of my favorite
bumper stickers,” said Dr. Epley, of Chicago. “ ‘Jesus loves
you, but I’m his favorite.’ ”
For all that, an abiding feeling of
moral superiority is intrinsic to what some psychologists call
self-enhancement. So-called self-enhancers think that they’re
blessed, that they’re highly appreciated by others and that they’ll
come out on top. And sometimes they do, studies suggest —
especially in life-or-death crises like 9/11 and the Bosnian
war.
“Self-enhancers do very well, across the
board, on measures of mental health in these situations,” said
George Bonanno, a psychologist at Columbia.
But in the mundane ebb and flow of life,
an inflated sense of personal virtue can also be a minefield.
“Overconfident stock traders tend to do worse; people buy too many
gym memberships,” said Dr. Dunning, of Cornell. “In the economic
realm, the outcomes are not so good.”
Not to mention that walking around in a
pair of moral platform shoes does make it harder to get up when you
fall.
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