If there’s one thing that people across the political spectrum can agree on, it’s that they cannot stand a hypocrite.
In our polarised political climate, the charge of hypocrisy is one of the most powerful weapons, often used to silence anyone with whom we don’t agree without having to actually engage with their arguments. Once someone has laid out any kind of moral principle, if they are ever found to have so much as come close to breaching it, it is as if they have effectively forfeited their right to say anything else on the subject.
“Hypocrite!” a woman shouted at Dominic Cummings as the British prime minister’s chief adviser entered his home back in May, shortly after it emerged that he had broken the government’s own lockdown rules by making a 264-mile trip across England.
Some pointed out that the hordes of photographers, journalists and other members of the public who had gathered outside his house were themselves being somewhat hypocritical, given that many of them were failing to adequately social-distance as they chided him.
It’s much harder to recognise our own hypocrisy. Virtue-signallers who spend their time calling out other people’s moral transgressions often seem blissfully unaware of the instances when they may be breaking their own too-rigid rules.
In a recent poll by Ipsos Mori, 75 per cent of respondents said they were following the government’s coronavirus regulations all or nearly all of the time, but only 12 per cent believed the rest of the British public was doing so. In the early days of lockdown, one would frequently hear grumblings about how many people were in the park, making it impossible to keep two metres apart. One wondered how they had managed to find this out.
And while people tend to make fairly accurate assessments of others’ behaviour in areas where there isn’t much implied moral judgment or a sense of them unfairly obtaining an advantage, in surveys on issues such as tax avoidance and throwing “sickies”, we hugely overestimate how “bad” other people are.
We seem to have a kind of paranoia that everyone apart from us is busy breaking the moral principles that hold society together. Our instinct, therefore, is to pounce upon anyone who transgresses, so as to keep that moral framework intact, while giving ourselves a considerable amount of leeway. To varying extents, we are all, in other words, hypocrites.
So why can’t we stand this characteristic in others? Daniel Effron, associate professor of organisational behaviour at the London Business School, says it’s because we resent people getting a “moral benefit” that they don’t deserve. If someone condemns another for some kind of wrongdoing, they are in effect signalling that they themselves not only do not engage in that activity, but are more virtuous than the person who does.
Of course, says Effron, we are more motivated to rationalise our own inconsistent actions than those of others — and it is easier to do so because we have greater insight into what lies behind them and a greater desire to excuse ourselves.
Hypocrisy is often described as “saying one thing and doing another”. But actually it is about more than mere inconsistency; failing to “practise what you preach” gets closer to it. A drug addict who warns others not to take drugs is not seen as a hypocrite, though someone who publicly condemns drug-taking as morally abhorrent, say, and then is found to have been taking drugs themselves probably would be.
Donald Trump has been wildly inconsistent during his presidency, and is often called a liar, a cheat, a fraud. Accusations of hypocrisy, however, don’t tend to stick. That’s because Trump doesn’t take the moral high ground; he misleads, exaggerates and brags shamelessly. That gives him a kind of protection against the charge.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, it was suggested that he should be taken “seriously, but not literally”. “If you don’t take someone’s words literally, that person has a lot of latitude in what they can then do without seeming like a hypocrite,” says Effron.
While people may not like a liar, according to Jillian Jordan, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School who led a 2017 study on the subject, hypocrites are seen as worse. In the study, people perceived those who condemned others for illegally downloading music and then did so themselves as more objectionable — and more hypocritical — than those who lied about doing so.
“Our theory is that the problem with hypocrisy is that it involves false signalling, and interestingly hypocrisy involves more false signalling than outright lying,” she says. “That might contribute to why people hate hypocrites even more than they hate liars.”
But though we might hate it, hypocrisy is perhaps a necessary evil. If we are to live in a society guided by moral principles, it is inevitable that we imperfect humans will sometimes breach them. And while some of our moral principles might be too rigid, it is surely better to have standards that cannot always be kept than to not have any at all.
That doesn’t mean that we should not call out hypocrisy, but perhaps it should be allowed to slide down our ranking of moral transgressions. After all, we are all hypocrites some of the time. Never more so than when we are berating others for their hypocrisy.
Jemima Kelly is a reporter on FT Alphaville. Follow her on Twitter and email her at . Simon Kuper is away
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