Abstract
We are all apt to alter our beliefs and even our principles to suit the prevailing winds. Examples abound in public life (think of the politician who bases an election campaign on the need to address the budget emergency represented by a deficit, only to be indifferent to an even larger deficit once in office), but we are all subject to similar reversals. We often accuse one another of hypocrisy when these kinds of reversals occur. Sometimes the accusation is justified. In this paper, however, I will argue that in many such cases, we don’t manifest hypocrisy, even if our change of mind is not in response to new evidence. Marshalling evidence from psychology and evolutionary theory, I will suggest that we are designed to update our beliefs in response to social signals: as these signals change, we change our minds, often without even noticing.
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Notes
- 1.
It is moral hypocrisy that is the focus here. Formally, hypocrisy can occur in any domain that is governed by norms: the domain of aesthetics, knowledge, prudence, and so on. But hypocrisy seems to attract opprobrium only in the moral and prudential domains, and even in the latter perhaps only insofar as it is seen as a kind of moral hypocrisy to offer advice one does not abide by oneself.
- 2.
A caveat: these studies, like almost all the experimental (but not the correlational) work in social psychology at the time, used small samples and almost certainly report effect sizes that are exaggerated by the failure to report unsuccessful trials. That said, Dong, van Prooijen, and van Lange (2019) report three very much larger studies (one preregistered) that replicate these results.
- 3.
Graham et al. define moral duplicity as “claiming moral motives to others, falsely”. It is not clear whether they require the agent recognizes the falseness. Moral duplicity is also more encompassing than strong hypocrisy, because it includes agents who actually live up to their principles, if and when they are motivated by impression management rather than moral concern to do so.
- 4.
Sie (2015) also argues that the participants in these experiments do not act wrongly. Rather, she argues, experimental demands lead them to wrongly think they are acting contrary to what morality requires of them. I think it is more plausible to think that while the experimental manipulations succeed in altering their conception of where exactly their own action falls on the continuum from forbidden to supererogatory, in all variants they see their action as morally permissible.
- 5.
Lönnqvist, Irlenbusch, and Walkowitz (2014) explicitly address a question that seems to bear on this interpretation: perhaps participants see themselves as already having ‘won’ the lottery by being given the opportunity to assign tasks to themselves and others, and therefore see themselves as having no obligation not to take the positive task for themselves. To test this possibility, they had independent raters assess their slightly different paradigm, a dictator game in which the participant could choose an 5/5 distribution, an 8/2 distribution or to flip a coin. On a 9 point scale that collapsed across measures for “unfair-fair,” “immoral-moral” and “bad-virtuous,” with the midpoint of the scale marked “neutral”, the mean ratings were 8.09 (5/5), 3.56 (8/2) and 6.27 (coin flip). The experimenters claim that these data demonstrate that participants indeed see themselves as acting contrary to their own moral judgments. I disagree: I don’t think this is evidence that 8/2 is seen as selfish, in the sense required to establish hypocrisy, by the participants. The extreme end of these scales does not correspond with the required option; it corresponds with the best option. The midpoint is therefore halfway between the immoral (unfair; vicious) and the morally best.
- 6.
Again, one would should treat this result with caution in the light of the replication crisis and the small number of participants. A number of studies have reported that images of eyes increase prosocial behavior (e.g. Rigdon, Ishii, Watabe, & Kitayama, 2009) but recent meta-analyses suggest that the effect size is not significantly different from zero (Northover, Pedersen, Cohen, & Andrews, 2017). Perhaps, however, the mirror manipulation succeeds where images of eyes does not.
- 7.
Admittedly, there is a good deal of controversy over the High Gods theory, especially with regard to the claim that moralizing gods are needed for the emergence of complex societies (e.g. Whitehouse et al., 2019). But even its harshest critics accept that even if it does not explain the emergence of large scale settlements, moralizing gods probably helps to explain their stability over time (see Gray & Watts, 2017).
- 8.
It would be a mistake to place too much weight on these experiments, because most were conducted prior to widespread awareness of problems of replicability, and often had too small a number of participants for us to be confident that the effect is real, even setting aside the possibility of inflated effect sizes due to the file drawer effect. There has not yet been a preregistered multi-lab replication attempt of this work, though one is currently in the planning stages. That said, there are preregistered replications of the basic finding (e.g. Forstmann & Sagioglou, 2020), which makes me somewhat optimistic that the effect will replicate. The researchers behind the multi-lab replication attempt report that they believe that the effect is real, albeit inflated in the published literature (Vaidis & Sleegers, 2018).
- 9.
Interestingly, there is evidence that we represent our beliefs at a finer level of granularity than the beliefs of others (Thornton, Weaverdyck, Mildner, & Tamir, 2019). The evidence I am marshalling here suggests, however, that we do not thereby represent stable and detailed mental states at all. There are three reasons why the data from Thornton et al. are compatible with my picture. First, their claim is comparative: people represent their own states more distinctly than those of others (there is a gradient in distinctness, such that the more socially distant someone is, the less distinct our representations tend to be). More distinct is compatible with very indistinct, of course. Second, as Thornton et al. note, “rich representations are not necessarily accurate ones”; indeed the richness of the representations may help give rise to an illusion that we know our own mental states (6). Third, any temptation to regard this as evidence about the distinctness of one’s mental states should be heavily tempered by the method, which did not ask participants to introspect but instead asked them to consider images paired with state descriptors.
- 10.
Note that constructing beliefs rather than recalling them is in fact very common, especially with regard to dispositional beliefs. As Gareth Evans (1982) influentially noted, we answer questions like “do you believe there will be another World War?” not by looking inward, to a repository of our beliefs, but by considering the world. This kind of case is somewhat different from those under discussion, since in this kind of case we (apparently) attempt to consider the facts that make the claim true or false in it, rather than looking to indirect cues for whether we should accept it (in fact, I am confident that we also look to cues to belief in even the best of cases). Nevertheless, given the similarities it is unsurprising that there is no phenomenological difference between the different ways of constructing our beliefs on the spot.
- 11.
It might be weaker on one side than another if group identification is weaker on that side, or if identification is not with party or partisan groupings. The rise of identity politics might entail a weakening of broad-based cues for belief revision, in favour of a fragmentation of such cues.
- 12.
It is important to note that many epistemologists who accept that disagreements with epistemic peers constitute higher-order evidence might reject my claim that outsourcing is rational, because they advance extremely restrictive notions of who counts as an epistemic peer. As Lackey (2010) notes, the idealized notion of peerhood these accounts work with threatens to cut the debate off from the realworld cases that gives it its point. In any case, we can set this issue aside: when I disagree with many others, I can be very confident that among the dissenters are many people who are at least my epistemic peer (no doubt some are my epistemic superior – at least with regard to the proposition at issue – and I ought to give their dissent especially heavy weight).
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to an audience at “Evolutionary ethics: The nuts and bolts approach,” held at Oxford Brookes in July 2018 for helpful comments. I am especially grateful to Helen De Cruz, Johan De Smedt and Mark Alfano for extremely helpful comments on the written version, in light of which the paper has been revised extensively.
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Levy, N. (2021). Not So Hypocritical After All: Belief Revision Is Adaptive and Often Unnoticed. In: De Smedt, J., De Cruz, H. (eds) Empirically Engaged Evolutionary Ethics. Synthese Library, vol 437. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68802-8_3
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