Being dishonest about our prejudices: moral dissonance and self-justification

Abstract

We applied the moral dissonance reduction framework, used to explain the maintenance of a positive self-concept in dishonest behavior, to understand self-justification of prejudice. Participants identified ambiguously negative intergroup behaviors, then evaluated those behaviors when performed by others and themselves. As predicted by moral dissonance reduction, participants were less critical of their own behavior when considering others’ behaviors before their own. In a third study directly comparing prejudiced and dishonest behavior, participants’ responses showed the greatest self-justification in the initial question about their behavior regardless of the content of the question, whereas subsequent questions showed more stability, consistent with the idea that participants adjusted their initial self-reports to avoid damage to their self-concepts.

Keywords:

• prejudice
• self-justification
• self-concept maintenance
• moral dissonance

Disclosure Statement

The authors state that no outside funding source was used to support this research, and there are no potential conflicts of interest in our reporting of the results.

Notes

¹ As indeed was Ms. Smith. When the story quoted here ran online, Ms. Smith posted a public comment, not disputing any of the quotations, but saying to the reporter, “After our talk this is the conversation you want to impart? … Obviously, there are powers that be in this Village that DO NOT want me in Government. Mr. Wehner you had an opportunity to have a real conversation with the public. To make a difference. To bring together. To rise above hate and to inform” (Wehner, 2017). How using racial slurs was rising above hate was not evident in her comments.

² The remaining subscales, as predicted, were not significantly correlated with the wrongness ratings of the fine, rude, and prejudiced items. Correlation coefficients for external motivation to control prejudice were −.11, .04, and −.08, respectively. For the moral foundation of loyalty, coefficients were −.15, −.18, and −.14; for authority, −.16, −.07, and −.16; for purity, −.08, −.17, −.14.

³ We also ran this analysis just with people who were reporting on the behavior that they remembered doing, rather than those who said in the manipulation check that they were imagining that they did the behavior. The results were the same: a significant only effect for target order, F(1, 60) = 6.40, p = .014, driven by changes in reports of their own behaviors.

⁴ The self–other gap was uncorrelated with moral foundations of loyalty (r = .04, p = .73), authority (r = .10, p = .40), or purity (r = −.004, p = .97).

⁵ As expected, the remaining three Moral Foundations subscales were uncorrelated with the self–other gap for frequency. The gap was uncorrelated with loyalty (r = .05, p = .40), authority (r = .06, p = .32), or purity (r = .03, p = .66) in the overall data set, and no correlations emerged as significant when looking by order condition.