Holier Than Thou? No, Just Less Evil
People judge themselves based on their own positive intentions, but they judge others based on their actions.
Holier Than Thou? No, Just Less EvilPaper Less Evil than You: Bounded Self-Righteousness in Character Inferences, Emotional Reactions, and Behavioral Extremes
Recent research suggests that self-righteousness is bounded, arising more reliably in evaluations of immoral actions than in evaluations of moral actions. Here, we test four implications of this asymmetry in self-righteousness and the mechanism explaining it. We find that people are less likely to make negative character inferences from their own unethical behavior than from others鈥� unethical behavior (Experiment 1), believe they would feel worse after an unethical action than others (Experiment 2), and believe they are less capable of extreme unethical behavior than others (Experiment 3). We observe weaker self鈥搊ther differences in evaluations of ethical actions. This occurs partly because people base evaluations of themselves on their own moral intentions, leading to predictable individual differences. People more likely to ascribe cynical motives to their own behavior exhibit a smaller asymmetry in self-righteousness (Experiment 4). Self-righteousness seems better characterized as feeling 鈥渓ess evil than thou鈥� than feeling 鈥渉olier than thou.鈥�
Published in: Personality and Psychology Bulletin
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- 2017
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