Rocky Mountain Psych Association Annual Conference
Did anyone attend the RMPA conference this past weekend? There were some great speakers including Tom Pyszczynski, C. Daniel Batson, David Myers, and Bill McKeachie (David Kenny was supposed to be there but had travel problems).
What are people's thoughts on Batson's theory of moral hypocrisy? Does anyone have any ideas as to why he has been unable to find people who use principalism in decision-making in place of egoism, altruism, or more recently, moral hypocrisy?
His paradigm for assessing these ideas is really very clever. He tells participants to assign themselves to a condition and assign another person (who unbeknownst to them does not exist) to another condition. One of those conditions is positive and the other is either neutral or negative, depending on the study. He also offers them a coin for which they can use to decide who is assigned to which condition. Participants who use the coin and those who do not assign themselves to the positive condition equally often, about 90% of the time (which is significantly greater than the 50% that the coin should dictate). Participants also rate their actions as more moral when flipping the coin, even if it involves tampering with (rigging) the outcome.
What are people's thoughts on Batson's theory of moral hypocrisy? Does anyone have any ideas as to why he has been unable to find people who use principalism in decision-making in place of egoism, altruism, or more recently, moral hypocrisy?
His paradigm for assessing these ideas is really very clever. He tells participants to assign themselves to a condition and assign another person (who unbeknownst to them does not exist) to another condition. One of those conditions is positive and the other is either neutral or negative, depending on the study. He also offers them a coin for which they can use to decide who is assigned to which condition. Participants who use the coin and those who do not assign themselves to the positive condition equally often, about 90% of the time (which is significantly greater than the 50% that the coin should dictate). Participants also rate their actions as more moral when flipping the coin, even if it involves tampering with (rigging) the outcome.