Punishing hypocrisy: The roles of hypocrisy and moral emotions in deciding culpability and punishment of criminal and civil moral transgressors

Abstract

Three experiments explored how hypocrisy affects attributions of criminal guilt and the desire to punish hypocritical criminals. Study 1 established that via perceived hypocrisy, a hypocritical criminal was seen as more culpable and was punished more than a non-hypocritical criminal who committed an identical crime. Study 2 expanded on this, showing that negative moral emotions (anger and disgust) mediated the relationships between perceived hypocrisy, criminal guilt, and punishment. Study 3 replicated the emotion finding from Study 2 using new scenarios where group agents were clearly aware of the hypocrisy of their actions, yet acted anyway. Again, perceived hypocrisy worked through moral emotions to affect criminal guilt and punishment. The current studies provide empirical support for theories relating hypocrisy and moral transgressions to moral emotions, also informing the literature on the role of moral emotions in moral reasoning and legal decision making.

Keywords:

• Hypocrisy
• Morality
• Moral emotions
• Anger
• Disgust
• Psychology and law

The authors would like to thank Dr Roger Giner-Sorolla and two anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this manuscript.

The authors would like to thank Dr Roger Giner-Sorolla and two anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this manuscript.

Notes

¹ With one exception that did not affect any primary hypothesis, participant gender had no main or interactive effects on any dependent variable in any of the three studies reported here. Therefore, gender is not included as a factor in any analysis. The one effect involving gender (in Study 2) is reported there.

² For additional discussions of directly testing proposed theoretical models and examining hypothesised indirect effects, even in the absence of significant total effects of X(s) on Y(s), see, e.g., Hayes, 2009; MacKinnon, Krull, and Lockwood, 2000; MacKinnon, Lockwood, Hoffman, West, and Sheets, 2002; Preacher and Hayes, 2008; Shrout and Bolger, 2002; Zhao, Lynch, and Chen, 2010.

³ For effects involving a dichotomous exogenous predictor, unstandardised coefficients of indirect paths provide interpretable measures of effect size and can be understood as mean group-level differences in an outcome Y as a function of unit changes in X (Hayes, 2009; Rucker et al., 2011).

⁴ A check question that tested participants' attention to the details of the case was also included (“What type of car was Ms Jameson driving?”). Because all participants answered this question correctly, none were excluded.

⁵ In Study 2, a significant interaction between gender and condition on perceived hypocrisy (p=.01) was found. This interaction showed that the effect of condition on perceived hypocrisy was stronger for males than for females. However, for both men and women, perceived hypocrisy was significantly greater in the high hypocrisy condition relative to the low hypocrisy condition (ps<.05), and we therefore collapsed all analyses across participant gender.

⁶ The original N=116, but six participants were removed from the sample for failing “check” questions (i.e., the name of the company in the scenarios) designed to test participants' attention to the task.

⁷ Analyses using the guilt question alone led to similar conclusions as using the composite measure.