Post No.: 0854
Furrywisepuppy says:
Being blind to hypocrisy, or having double standards, is a major psychological bias…
It’s ‘don’t call me names or shout at me’, but I’ll call you names or shout at you if I like. It’s ‘don’t judge me’, but I’ll judge you. It’s ‘you’re lazy’ if you don’t do the chores, but I’m too busy if I don’t myself. It’s ‘other people’s fault for making a tourist hotspot too overcrowded’, when I’m precisely here making up the numbers too! It’s ‘other people’s fault for panic buying’, because it stops me from hoarding enough for myself! We’ll gossip behind people’s backs, when we wish others said stuff straight to our faces. We love to spontaneously tell others about our own achievements, but don’t want to hear other people gloat about what they’ve done. Most people want less political division but believe that it’s the other side that’s preventing the unity! Other people are being too negative, bitchy or complain too much, which is a complaint itself(!) So we can give it but cannot take it!
‘Cheats should be exposed by prying into their personal information’, unless I’m the one cheating, in which case my personal information should be kept private. It’s ‘harmful stereotypes or prejudice’, but it’s only joking or banter if I say something similar. It’s considered naturally helping out our friends if we help them in professional contexts, but cronyism if others do the same thing. People ogle and comment on the body parts of strangers, but then later sanctimoniously bemoan how others are improper for objectifying people! Or they’re complimentary if one says them, but creepy if others make the same kinds of unsolicited comments. We tend to call others weird when we see them do something we consider unusual, yet we don’t call ourselves weird even as we point out our own quirks. If caught red-handed, we’ll claim that it was an accident or we didn’t mean it, but we’ll call it BS when others claim their misdeeds were accidents or they didn’t intend them. So our offences are always justified, whereas other people’s similar offences aren’t. ‘Whataboutism’ is a fallacious attempt at justifying one’s own behaviours in a ‘what about them because they lied/cheated/stole/whatever too?’ kind of way. People who express virtuous opinions in public may do non-virtuous things in private. So it’s far easier to preach than to practise what we preach!
What most people really want is ‘one rule/standard for themselves and another rule/standard for others’ because most people think they’re noble and trustworthy whereas other people are relatively more ignoble and untrustworthy.
Regarding religion, some of the worst kinds of credibility undermining displays, or CRUDs, are hypocrisies – or having ‘one rule for some and another rule for others’. A church that urges its followers to donate because money shouldn’t be coveted and ‘the more they donate, the closer to God and salvation they’ll get’, yet the pastors appearing to spend that money on themselves by living lavish lifestyles, is an example of such a hypocrisy.
Contradictions are also CRUDs, and these might include saying that ‘God gave us free will’ to make our own choices and forge our own outcomes, yet things will only happen if ‘God willing’. Or we should forgive all, yet be intolerant of unbelievers and proselytise them! Praying for forgiveness also appears to mean that priests can be caught doing immoral acts yet they’ll still apparently go to heaven because they prayed and believed in forgiveness enough.
Other types of CRUDs involve unethical practices, such as trying to indoctrinate people as young as possible, or deliberately targeting the vulnerable such as the lonely or those who’ve just experienced a personal trauma and are in search of a support network.
Not all credibility enhancing displays, or CREDs, are great either because they could attract followers who’ll follow something dangerous. Hugely charismatic cult/religious leaders like Osama bin Laden expressed a lot of CREDs in the way he truly believed in his vision and walked the walk as well as talked the talk.
Another country is wrong for detaining people in internment camps, yet it’s okay for us to detain migrants in such camps, and to even separate their children and cage them, because ‘they’re all a bunch of drug dealers, criminals and rapists’. Or another country is wrong for repressing political dissidents, yet it’s okay for us to use law enforcement with military gear and tactics to tackle protestors who are precisely protesting against police brutality! If someone from another side breaks a rule then they’re ‘bang to rights’, but if someone from our side does the exact same thing then the whole thing is ‘blown out of all proportion’ and ‘aren’t there worse criminals to chase?’
It’s self-defence if our nation has developed nuclear weapons and deploys them everywhere around the world in submarines, but it’d be hostile if other nations were to do the same. We ask other nations to not provoke war by conducting missile or infantry drills too close to their borders, yet we’re the ones sending warships to surround the coastlines of other countries when they haven’t sent any around ours. Spying, and ‘black ops’ such as assassinations, are acceptable or even cool if our side does it against other sides, but it’s hypocritically not acceptable or cool if other sides attempt it against us. We say we want to spread the values of democracy across the world, yet we meddle in the democratic elections of foreign sovereign states in order to suit our national interests, and often by installing or supporting dictators there! So we can more easily notice the propaganda that affects others but not the propaganda that affects us. It’s like ‘we want peace and that’s why we kick violence in the face’(!) (Okay violence is the last resort and sometimes we reach that last resort under a grave situation, but the hypocrisy is failing to notice how our own ‘pre-emptive’ actions often escalate that possibility.)
All sides utilise fear, oppression and propaganda against their opposition, but our own biases, and perhaps indoctrinations, mean that we don’t always notice our own side’s hypocrisies. We think they’re brainwashing their populace with their ideologies. But we also brainwash ours with our own, along with perhaps a deep suspicion and hatred towards any opposing ideologies. The comparable extent is a weak moral defence (analogously like we ‘only’ stole $1M when they stole $2M). All the while, we’ll staunchly consider ourselves undoubtedly the ‘good guys’, when we’re sometimes just another side of the same coin.
We express hypocrisy whenever we assume someone from a foreign country ought to know everything about their home country, even when we don’t expect ourselves to know everything about our own home country – like all current news events, moments in history, landmarks or public figures. This happens far less nowadays but some even presume that if two families from the same foreign country have now immigrated to one’s own town, they ought to personally know each other(!) It’s like as if everybody from England ought to have Ed Sheeran’s phone number – because, you know, they’re from England and are English too(!) Racists therefore cannot see how uneducated they are when they presume other people are uneducated.
Just because someone was born and raised in Liverpool, it doesn’t mean we should expect them to know every song by the Beatles, or to even be a big fan of their music. You call yourself British when you’ve never visited Stonehenge or you don’t know the exact years when Henry VIII was on the throne?(!) Assuming that all Japanese people eat sushi or ramen every day or are into anime or manga is like assuming that all Americans eat hotdogs and burgers every day or are into American football or baseball. (Sushi and ramen make up probably only 3% of all separate categories of commonly eaten Japanese dishes in Japan.)
Second-generation immigrants (and onwards) won’t automatically know the supposed language of ‘their country’ for just being born that ethnicity(!) They’ll need to have been taught it by their parents. But if their parents didn’t speak to them much in that language (or at all) when young and they had little incentive to learn their parents’ tongue then they probably wouldn’t have learnt it. Specific languages aren’t passed on genetically! No one can even spell absolutely every single word in their own language they claim to be fluent in.
Parents are being hypocritical if they do things like yell or watch too much TV while telling their fluffy kids they shouldn’t do the same thing. They exhibit hypocrisy whenever they tell their children to not do things that they themselves did when young. (Albeit in this case it might be the apt thing to teach as a parent, who is now hopefully wiser. An adolescent child will probably still disobey such rules and do whatever they want though!)
We mount our high horses whenever others lie or steal as if we’ve never lied or stolen something in our entire lives before too (e.g. sweets when young). You may not have been caught but that doesn’t mean you didn’t do it. So we can behave in the exact same sorts of ways that we dislike in others. That’s hypocrisy. It’s just that we justify these acts differently when we do or have done it ourselves.
We also tend to like to seize all of the credit for any successes, but blame other people, equipment or luck for our failures. If we have a vehicle accident, it’s due to misfortune or someone else’s fault so it doesn’t count, but other people’s vehicle accidents were due to their lack of attention or skill. Bankers will blame both excessive and insufficient regulations in the same areas depending on whichever response will exonerate them best!
Whatever we think and however we react, we should realise that most other people likely think and react in similar ways too, given the same environment and stimuli. We often presume we’d behave better than them – but if the tables were turned, we’d likely feel and do as they feel and do right now. So we can be really poor at empathy even though it should be easy if we just hold a mirror up to ourselves.
We criticise other people’s characters even when we barely know them, and think we’re right, but when other people judge our characters (negatively), we think they know nothing about us. We believe we possess above-average insight and accuracy of judgement into other people’s behaviours when we don’t even have good insight into our own.
Hypocrisy is such an everyday occurrence. But we’re largely ignorant of it whenever we commit acts of hypocrisy due to our many biases. We judge others when we’d likely do the same things if we faced the exact same circumstances. We might become sell-outs too if bigger money were offered from elsewhere? We won’t know for sure unless we genuinely face the same situation. We’re all similar in how we think we’re all very different – more specifically in how we believe we possess greater moral integrity than others!
If we truly want to be morally better people, we must learn to be more aware of our own hypocrisies instead of rationalising how our similar actions are different to someone else’s.
Calling out a hypocrisy won’t make a wrongdoing no longer one though. For instance, calling out someone, who has been racially abused, for being a perpetrator of racial abuse themselves, won’t make their claim for being racially abused any less real or serious. These claims of abuse would constitute two separate offences that should be investigated and dealt with separately. And hypocrisy doesn’t necessarily mean that a statement is incorrect – just like a greedy person telling others not to eat too much isn’t incorrect, even though the greedy person appears to lack credibility for saying it themselves.
Woof!
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