Hypocrisy judgements are affected by target attitude strength and attitude moralization

Abstract

Researchers and philosophers have debated what leads people to judge others as being hypocritical. Some research has shown that perceivers consider targets to be more hypocritical when those targets contradict attitudes that are strongly (e.g., moralized and/or certain) rather than weakly held by the target. In the present work, I attempt to advance this research in several respects. First, I integrate these findings with research on the dimensions of attitude strength (i.e., commitment, embeddedness) to provide a more structured analysis of these claims. I show that characterizing a target's views as embedded and committed has many of the same hypocrisy-related effects as labelling those views as moral, and affect (negative) evaluations of targets through similar mechanisms. However, in Experiment 3, I show that moral attitudes are, nonetheless, perceived as distinct from classic strength dimensions in one crucial respect: the presumption that the target would impose them on other people. Furthermore, whereas judgements of hypocrisy relating to embedded/committed attitudes can be mitigated when perceivers engage in situational attribution, perceivers rendering judgements of hypocrisy relating to moral attitudes resist situational counter-explanations.