Published: November 06, 2009 09:08 am      

STAWAR: Self deception 101

Americans are a very forgiving people, but we have a hard time excusing people who blatantly don’t practice what they preach.

Late night talk shows have delighted in the fall of self-righteous politicians such as Elliot Spitzer and Larry Craig, not to mention televangelists like Jim Baker, Ted Haggard and Jimmy Swaggart. Bad behavior is one thing, but being a hypocrite is something else altogether.

Maybe that’s why Bill Clinton sort of got a pass, he certainly was a scoundrel, but at least didn’t preach to us about morality. Psychologist C. Daniel Bateson from University of Kansas has defined “moral hypocrisy” as trying to appear moral without incurring the actual cost of being moral.

If you have ever tried to lecture your children about the dangers of smoking and drinking with a pack of Marlboros in your pocket and a six-pack of Bud in the refrigerator, you realize that what you believe and what you do are often miles apart. Children are especially adept at sniffing out hypocrites.

Some researchers believe that emotionally, we can easily tell right from wrong, but with our highly evolved brains, we quickly learn to deceive ourselves. We also call it fooling or kidding ourselves although my father had another term for it.

Most of us grow more adept at this self-deception with experience. Since the 1950s, social psychologists have known that people seek out, what has been called cognitive consistency. That is, they want their thoughts and behaviors, to fit neatly together. When they don’t mesh, this conflict is called “cognitive dissonance” and creates discomfort.

People are highly motivated to reduce these bad feelings by achieving some sort of internal equilibrium. Since we can’t go back in time to change our past behaviors, we usually end up modifying our existing beliefs.

For example, if we find ourselves having done something that violates our values and can’t come up a good reason to explain it away, we often find ourselves subtly changing our attitudes. In the classic experiment, subjects were asked to do an unpleasant job — one that almost everyone would agree was tedious and undesirable. Some subjects were highly paid to do this job, while other were paid only a minimal amount.

Afterward, everyone was asked to rate the desirability of the job. The experimenters were surprised to find that subjects who were paid the most, still rated the job as being very undesirable, while the minimum wage earners tended to rate the job as “not so bad.”

Evidently the highly paid subjects had decided that the job must have truly been awful, or why else would they have been paid so much to do it. The generous pay was adequate justification for them to work at such a disagreeable task. The poorly paid subjects, however, had to rationalize that perhaps the job wasn’t quite as bad as everyone thought, in order to make sense out of their actions.

Newsweek science writer Sharon Begley recently described research from the University of California at Davis, which has revealed the brain processes that underlie cognitive dissonance. Studying people in conflict, researchers found that that the amount of electrical activity in regions of the brain, associated with lying, predicts how much people will change their attitudes. Begley says, “The brain regions involved in resolving cognitive dissonance are so nimble, enabling us to find rationalizations ... it’s a wonder anyone can stick to his principles.”

With digital video pervasive these days, politicians are having a hard time escaping their own pronouncements. Voters, however, are rather biased about identifying hypocrisy.

Psychologist Jamie Barden from Howard University says hypocrisy is in the “eye of the beholder.” He conducted research which found that existing beliefs strongly influenced people’s perceptions of hypocrisy in others. Individuals who had a strong political party affiliations — based on self-report and past voting easily identified hypocritical behaviors on the part of candidates from the opposing party, but seldom saw it in candidates from their own party, even when the objective facts were identical.

When our self-interest overpowers our moral control, we have all kinds of way to try to deceive ourselves. We try to achieve what Stanford University psychologist Albert Bandura calls, “moral disengagement.” Some of the ways we do this include: 1. reinterpreting the situation by euphemistic re-labeling what has happened (wars become “police actions” and torture becomes “enhanced interrogation techniques”); 2. convincing ourselves that the behavior is common or that it was really someone else’s fault (everybody does it or the devil made me do it); 3. minimizing or denying the negative consequences of our actions (All my DUIs were just barely over the legal limit); and perhaps worse of all 4. dehumanizing or blaming the victims. (She was asking for it.)

Bateson says that hypocritical behavior may stem from our failure to learn standards well enough to guide our behavior or from situational pressures such as the need to conform. But, he believes, most people act this way simply to reap the material rewards of selfishness, while maintaining the social advantages of appearing moral.

Being moral often has a very high price, as comedian Bob Newhart once said, “Sometimes when you do the right thing, it turns your stomach.” Hypocrisy may be adaptive in an evolutionarily sense, because it allows people to garner more resources without feeling much guilt or anxiety.

Finally, Florida State University psychologist Roy Baumeister says that all of us have two internal mechanisms to help us resolve cognitive conflicts. One is like having an internal — but rather shady — lawyer, who only presents evidence that defends, excuses or minimizes our bad behaviors. The other mechanism involves having an intuitive scientist within us, who tells us the truth — sort of like Disney’s Jiminy Cricket. It reminds me of those cartoons, where there is an angel perched on one shoulder fighting with a devil on the other.

Perhaps you remember talk show host Rush Limbaugh, speaking out why we should punish substance abusers to the full extent of the law, just before he was arrested for doctor shopping to obtain narcotics. Or maybe you can recall William Bennett, the former cabinet secretary and author of the “Book Of Virtues,” revealing that he was high-stakes gambler and had had lost millions in Vegas.

They, as well as the rest of us, would do better to listen to our internal Jiminy Crickets and as Lincoln said be touched by “the better angels of our nature.”

Terry L. Stawar, Ed.D. lives in Georgetown and is the CEO of LifeSpring the local community mental health center in Jeffersonville. He can be reached at tstawar@lifespr.com or 812-206-1234. Checkout his Welcome to Planet-Terry blog and podcast at https://planetterry.wordpress.com

  

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