Hypocrisy and culture: Failing to practice what you preach receives harsher interpersonal reactions in independent (vs. interdependent) cultures

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2017.12.009Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Word-deed misalignment occurs when people fail to practice a value they preach.

  • Such misalignment elicits moral condemnation and distrust in the West.

  • We conducted three experiments, plus a field study with 46 nationalities.

  • Results show less negative reactions to misalignment outside the West.

  • We suggest misalignment seems less hypocritical in interdependent cultures.

Abstract

Failing to practice what you preach is often condemned as hypocrisy in the West. Three experiments and a field survey document less negative interpersonal reactions to misalignment between practicing and preaching in cultures encouraging individuals' interdependence (Asian and Latin American) than in those encouraging independence (North American and Western Europe). In Studies 1–3, target people received greater moral condemnation for a misdeed when it contradicted the values they preached than when it did not – but this effect was smaller among participants from Indonesia, India, and Japan than among participants from the USA. In Study 4, employees from 46 nations rated their managers. Overall, the more that employees perceived a manager's words and deeds as chronically misaligned, the less they trusted him or her – but the more employees' national culture emphasized interdependence, the weaker this effect became. We posit that these cultural differences in reactions to failures to practice what one preaches arise because people are more likely to view the preaching as other-oriented and generous (vs. selfish and hypocritical) in cultural contexts that encourage interdependence. Study 2 provided meditational evidence of this possibility. We discuss implications for managing intercultural conflict, and for theories about consistency, hypocrisy, and moral judgment.

Introduction

Practicing what you preach is not always easy. For example, leaders may struggle to enact policies that fit their stated ideals, and employees may feel obligated to pay lip service at work to values that do not guide their behavior at home. In Western cultural contexts, failing to practice what you preach can have grave interpersonal consequences. The present research examines the possibility that outside the West, misaligned practicing and preaching seems more appropriate and has less severe consequences. Specifically, we predict that people react less negatively to such misalignment in cultures encouraging individuals' interdependence (e.g., Asia and Latin America) compared to cultures encouraging individuals' independence (e.g., North America and Western Europe).

In Western contexts, “failing to practice what you preach” is often judged as hypocrisy (Stone & Fernandez, 2008), so it is no surprise it elicits negative reactions. For example, it can be seen as hypocritical to “say one thing but do another” (Barden, Rucker, & Petty, 2005), or to excuse yourself while condemning others for the same misdeed (Lammers, 2012, Lammers et al., 2010, Polman and Ruttan, 2012, Valdesolo and DeSteno, 2007, Valdesolo and DeSteno, 2008). Research in the West has focused on two negative interpersonal consequences of misaligned practicing and preaching. The first is moral condemnation. Vignette experiments show that the same misdeed seems more hypocritical and thus receives greater moral condemnation when it contradicts values the transgressor has previously endorsed than when it does not (Barden et al., 2005, Barden et al., 2014, Effron et al., 2015, Jordan et al., 2017, Laurent et al., 2013, Powell and Smith, 2012). For example, an academic might seem less moral and more deserving of punishment for committing plagiarism if she had previously given a speech about the importance of academic integrity than if she had not. The second interpersonal consequence is distrust. Field studies show that when employees perceive managers as chronically “saying one thing but doing another,” they distrust the managers, which dampens the employees' motivation, organizational commitment, and performance (for a review, see Simons, Leroy, Collewaert, & Masschelein, 2014).

Although this previous research often equates hypocrisy with inconsistency, the two are actually distinct constructs (Monin & Merritt, 2012). We distinguish between failures to practice what you preach – termed word-deed misalignment (Simons, 2002) – and hypocrisy, which we view as a morally discrediting attribution for such misalignment (cf. Cha & Edmondson, 2006). Specifically, we argue misalignment seems hypocritical only if it appears motivated by a self-serving desire to seem more virtuous than you really are (cf. Batson, Thompson, Seuferling, Whitney, & Strongman, 1999). When people attribute word-deed misalignment to a different motive, they view it as less hypocritical and condemn it less severely (Barden et al., 2005, Barden et al., 2014). For example, when a person advises others to “do as I say, not as I've done,” observers tend not to listen because they view her advice as hypocritical – unless she has suffered for what she has done. In that case, they interpret her advice as a genuine attempt to help them and are more inclined to listen (Effron & Miller, 2015). More generally, the same act of misalignment can seem more hypocritical or more benign, depending on the situations in which it occurs. We propose that culture, like situations, powerfully shape how people understand word-deed misalignment. Such misalignment may not seem as hypocritical – and thus not elicit the same degree of negative interpersonal reactions – in all cultural contexts.

Some theoretical perspectives imply that word-deed misalignment will have negative interpersonal consequences in all cultures. A person who preaches without practicing a value can be seen as sending a “false signal” about his or her morality (Jordan et al., 2017). A tendency to respond to such false signals with moral condemnation and distrust should help people in all societies avoid exploitation by individuals who merely appear benevolent. Also, evolutionary pressures may have created a fundamental human aversion to false moral signals, because early humans' survival depended in part on their ability to avoid exploitation (Kurzban, 2010). Finally, violating a value that one expects others to follow could seem unfair, which would violate moral codes across cultures (Graham et al., 2011).

However, we propose that aversion to word-deed misalignment arises in some important part from culturally grounded assumptions about the nature of the self and the drivers of human behavior. These assumptions are reflected in models of self – elements of culture revealed and fostered in individuals' psychological tendencies, in everyday social interactions and norms, in institutional policies, and in pervasive cultural ideas and values (Markus, 2016, Markus and Kitayama, 2003, Stephens et al., 2012). These models guide people's behavior and shape how they understand and explain others' actions.

According to the independent model, the self has a true essence, is defined by internal attributes, and is separate from social contexts (Fiske et al., 1998, Lillard, 1998, Markus and Conner, 2014, Markus and Kitayama, 1991, Riemer et al., 2014, Triandis, 1995). This model assumes a person's core identity remains constant across time and situations, even if he or she does not always behave the same way. The interdependent model, by contrast, defines the self by social roles, relationships, norms, and contexts (Fiske et al., 1998, Lillard, 1998, Markus and Kitayama, 1991, Riemer et al., 2014, Triandis, 1995). Because each person occupies multiple social roles, acts in different contexts, and owes attention, concern and loyalty to multiple individuals and groups, an interdependent self must be flexible and fluid across time and situations. Although all cultures require and foster both independence and interdependence, the independent model is more prominent and normatively sanctioned in the West (i.e., North America and Western Europe), whereas the interdependent model is more prominent and sanctioned in the non-Western cultures that characterize most of the world (Arnett, 2008, Henrich et al., 2010, Markus and Conner, 2014).

We propose that the independent model fosters more negative reactions than the interdependent model to people who fail to practice what they preach because each model suggests a different interpretation of the preaching. A negative interpretation is that their preaching has the selfish aim of creating the false appearance of virtue (i.e., hypocrisy). For example, an employee might publicly promote safety regulations despite privately ignoring them because she wants to earn a promotion, seem superior to her coworkers, or deflect attention from her shortcomings. A more positive explanation ascribes the preaching to generous, other-oriented intentions. For example, the employee may not personally care about safety, but promote it anyway because she wants to help her colleagues avoid punishment for violations, to bolster her organization's reputation, or to help her boss implement a safety initiative. According to such explanations, word-deed misalignment reflects a willingness to put others before the self rather than implying hypocrisy.

The negative explanation for preaching, with its emphasis on selfishness and hypocrisy, resonates with the independent model of self. To believe a person's preaching reflects feigned virtue requires drawing a distinction between how virtuous people “truly” are and how virtuous their public behavior is. This distinction is ingrained in the independent model's view that the self has a true essence separate from social contexts. The multiple faces a person chooses to show to the world are like masks, concealing the true self. The distinction between apparent and actual virtue makes less sense in the interdependent model, in which social contexts are defining elements of self. According to this model, virtue does not only come from within, but is bestowed by other people based on public behavior. The multiple faces a person must show to the world do not mask but constitute the self. For example, Japanese distinguish between the public or “front self” (omote) and the private or “back self” (ura). Importantly, both selves are authentic, and knowing when to restrain the “back” in deference to the “front” self is a valued skill. When the two conflict, Japanese are expected to favor the omote (Doi, 1986, Lebra, 2004, Riemer et al., 2014).

The positive explanation for preaching, with its emphasis on other-oriented intentions, resonates better with the interdependent model. Interdependence requires fulfilling relational obligations, preserving harmony, and being socially sensitive (Kitayama and Markus, 1999, Kitayama et al., 2004, Morling et al., 2002, Riemer et al., 2014). To meet these requirements, people must modify their words and deeds depending on whom they are with – which will sometimes require preaching without practicing. Observers in interdependent contexts are thus likely to assume that actors' preaching arises, at least in part, from other-oriented intentions. For example, in Asian cultures, “publicly agreeing, while privately disagreeing, with others may be seen as exemplifying tact and sensitivity rather than submission and cowardice” or hypocrisy (Hodges & Geyer, 2006, p. 7).

To summarize, people could have either selfish or generous reasons for preaching a value despite not practicing it. Observers in all cultures are capable of entertaining both types of reasons when seeking to explain an actor's behavior. However, we expect the selfish reasons to be more plausible and salient to actors in cultures that encourage independence. Given cultural differences in how people interpret word-deed misalignment, we expect cultural differences in how negatively people react to it. Specifically, we formulated the following hypothesis.

Hypothesis

Word-deed misalignment will provoke greater moral condemnation and distrust in cultures that emphasize independence relative to those that emphasize interdependence.

To our knowledge, we are the first to test this prediction. In so doing, we build on previous work documenting cultural differences in how people think about inconsistency. People in Asia are less likely than people in the West to expect themselves and others to act consistently across situations (Choi and Nisbett, 2000, English and Chen, 2007). Among people who hold a more interdependent model of self, cross-situational inconsistency is less predictive of well-being (Church et al., 2014, Cross et al., 2003, Suh, 2002). In Asian versus Western cultures, making choices that appear inconsistent with personal preferences is more common (Savani, Markus, & Conner, 2008), and does not arouse as much cognitive dissonance (Heine and Lehman, 1997, Hoshino-Browne et al., 2005, Kitayama et al., 2004). Finally, the dialectical mode of reasoning associated with interdependence embraces contradiction and paradox, unlike the analytical mode of reasoning associated with independence (Nisbett et al., 2001, Peng and Nisbett, 1999).

We go beyond this prior work on culture and inconsistency in several ways. The type of inconsistency we examine – between words and deeds – has not been considered in previous cultural psychology research, which has instead focused on inconsistencies between preferences and choices (e.g., Hoshino-Browne et al., 2005), among logical propositions (Peng & Nisbett, 1999), or among actions across situations (e.g., Choi & Nisbett, 2000). Perhaps because of this focus, previous research, unlike the present work, has not delved into on the negative interpersonal consequences of inconsistency, and how they might differ by culture. Instead, prior work has focused on intrapersonal consequences like cognitive dissonance and wellbeing.

Our work also contributes to research on how culture shapes the explanations people provide for others' behavior. Previous research suggests that people are more likely to attribute behavior to dispositions, instead of situations, in Western than in Asian cultures (e.g., Choi et al., 1999, Morris and Peng, 1994). We move beyond this disposition/situation dichotomy, which has been criticized for failing to capture how laypeople actually explain behavior (Malle, 1999, Malle, 2011; see also Stephens, Hamedani, Markus, Bergsieker, & Eloul, 2009), in four ways. First, we examine whether culture affects negative interpersonal reactions (i.e., moral condemnation and distrust), which research on culture and attribution has neglected. Second, we propose that culture affects whether people attribute preaching to selfish or generous motives, which is orthogonal to the disposition/situation distinction. Helpful or selfish motives for preaching could be mapped onto dispositions or situations (e.g., “she is a helpful/selfish person” vs. “her work environment causes her to act helpfully/selfishly”). Third, it is difficult to derive our hypothesis from the possibility that people in independent cultural contexts are more likely to attribute preaching to dispositions, because not all dispositional attributions would provoke condemnation and undermine trust. For example, someone who preaches environmentalism but does not always recycle could be the kind of person who truly values the environment despite not always acting “green,” or who merely pretends to value the environment to signal virtue. Both possibilities are dispositional attributions for preaching, but only the second suggests hypocrisy and would likely provoke negative reactions. Fourth, whereas previous research examines how culture can affect judgments of a person's deeds, we examine how culture affects reactions to the degree of misalignment between a person's deeds and words (above and beyond any cultural differences in reactions to the deeds themselves). For example, previous research would predict that Americans are more likely than Japanese to attribute reckless driving to the driver's disposition, which could conceivably lead Americans to condemn the driver more harshly than Japanese. Independent of whether this cultural difference emerged, though, we would predict that Americans would increase their condemnation more than Japanese upon learning that the driver used to preach the importance of road safety. In other words, whereas past research on dispositional attributions predicts only a main effect of culture on social judgment, we are interested in the interactive effect of culture and misalignment.

Our investigation builds theory in several other areas as well. First, we suggest that theories of hypocrisy judgments (e.g., Barden et al., 2005, Effron et al., 2015, Jordan et al., 2017, Simons, 2002) are based on Western assumptions about the nature of the self that do not fully generalize to global contexts. Thus, such misalignment may not have as negative interpersonal consequences everywhere in the world. Second, by investigating where word-deed inconsistency will seem most problematic, we shed light on what counts as hypocrisy and why it bothers people – a question about which current theories offer little consensus (e.g., Alicke et al., 2013, Graham et al., 2015, Hale and Pillow, 2015, Monin and Merritt, 2012). If failing to practice what you preach only counts as hypocrisy when attributed to an attempt to feign virtue, as we claim, then it should receive less negative reactions in cultures where this attribution is likely less salient. Third, we extend research in cultural psychology by testing our hypothesis – a novel prediction based on models of self (e.g., Markus & Kitayama, 2010).

We describe four studies testing whether people react more negatively to word-deed misalignment in cultures emphasizing independence than in those emphasizing interdependence. Following previous research in the social psychology literature on judgments of misalignment (e.g., Effron & Monin, 2010), the negative reaction examined in Studies 1–3 was moral condemnation. These vignette experiments tested whether people would receive harsher moral condemnation for the same misdeed if they previously preached against it than if they did not, and whether this effect would be larger in a Western country (the US) than in three diverse Asian countries (Japan, India, or Indonesia). Study 2 also examined cultural differences in how people explained the misalignment as a potential mechanism. Importantly, the design of these studies isolates reactions to misalignment from reactions to misdeeds, thus ruling out the alternative explanation that some cultures simply react more negatively to misdeeds than others.

Study 4 was a field survey examining culture differences in negative reactions to managers' word-deed misalignment in the workplace. Following previous research in the organizational behavior literature on misalignment (e.g., Kannan-Narasimhan and Lawrence, 2012, Palanski et al., 2011, Simons et al., 2007), the negative reaction examined was distrust. We expected that the more misaligned employees perceive a manager's words and deeds and being, the less they trust him or her, as in previous research (for a review, see Simons et al., 2014). Going beyond previous research, we tested whether this relationship between misalignment and trust would be stronger in cultures fostering independence than in those fostering interdependence. To increase generalizability beyond the East-West comparison in Studies 1–3, Study 4 recruited participants from 46 nations, which allowed us to test whether participants' reactions to misalignment depended on their home country's degree of interdependence. Study 4 also sought to isolate the role of independence/interdependence from other cultural variables.

We report all measures, manipulations, and exclusions for all studies (Simmons, Nelson, & Simonsohn, 2011). Verbatim materials are posted at https://osf.io/xy4c6/. The Online Supplement's Appendix S3 also reports two additional studies, described in the General discussion, that attest to Study 4's robustness and generalizability.

Section snippets

Study 1

Study 1 examined whether people would condemn word-deed misalignment more in the US (an independently-oriented culture) than in India (an interdependently-oriented culture). The paradigm isolated reactions to misalignment from reactions to misdeeds in general. Specifically, participants read about a target person's misdeed and completed a moral condemnation measure at two points in time: before and after learning that the target previously preached against the same misdeed. If people condemn

Study 2

The purpose of Study 2 was to examine our proposed mechanism: how people explain preaching when it is misaligned with practicing. We expected people from a more independent cultural context (the US) to impute more selfish motives for the preaching than people from a more interdependent cultural context (India). This cultural difference, in turn, should predict how much people condemned the failure to practice.

Study 3

Study 3 made several adjustments to assess robustness and generalizability. It recruited participants from non-MTurk populations in the US, Japan, and Indonesia, employed different vignettes, and made culturally informed modifications to the condemnation measure. Participants read about a minor employee misdeed; depending on randomly assigned condition, the misdeed either did or did not contradict the employee's prior preaching. Thus, Study 3 manipulated misalignment between subjects, which

Study 4

Having used lab methods to establish, conceptually replicate, and demonstrate a mechanism for our effect, we next assessed generalizability by testing our predictions in a field survey. Whereas participants in Studies 1–3 were MTurk participants or undergraduates judging fictional characters, Study 4 participants were recently-employed MBA students judging a real person from their lives: their former manager. Studies 1–3 adapted a paradigm commonly used in the psychology literature to assess

General discussion

Practicing exactly what you preach at all times may be an unrealistic goal, yet failing to do so can expose one to severely negative interpersonal reactions in Western cultural contexts. Our research suggests that misaligned practicing and preaching elicits less severe interpersonal reactions outside the West. In Studies 1–3, participants condemned someone more for the same misdeed when it represented a failure to practice what he or she preached than when it did not. However, misalignment had

Conclusion

Our results document an important aspect of diversity with broad implications. Cultural differences in the importance of alignment between words and deeds could shape not only how people evaluate each other in everyday life, but also how the public reacts to corporate and political scandals, or how judges and juries punish wrongdoing. Our results highlight the potential for cultural misunderstandings and conflict surrounding issues of alleged hypocrisy. The condemnation you receive for failing

Open practices

The exact materials administered in each study, including any measures included for exploratory purposes or for unrelated studies, can be found online at https://osf.io/xy4c6/. Please see the Online Supplement's Appendix S2 for an explanation of Study 3's exploratory measures.

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