ABSTRACT
Complying with moral norms increases the reputation of individuals in a society but imposes costs, or missed gains, upon the individual when confronted with temptations. Thus, moral hypocrisy-avoiding the cost of being moral while maintaining moral reputation-may be the optimal behavior of individuals, which is corroborated by psychological research and everyday experience. In this study, the effect of various social strategies-e.g., avoiding wrongdoers or disclosing hypocrites-on the prevalence of moral hypocrisy in a virtual society is evaluated. We show that diversity with respect to population and temptation density is crucial to overcome moral hypocrisy. 2.1 IntroductionMorality is a fundamental aspect of the societal organization of mankind. Standards of morality such as norms, values, and virtues
pervade the practical life of humans and safeguard the society from behaviors profitable for individuals but damaging for the group. Individuals fulfilling these standards gain a high reputation. This factor is considered to be an essential component for the development of morality in hunter-gatherer societies, where each individual is strongly aware that he or she must have a positive reputation in case of future need, and painfully guards it [11]. However, moral behavior can also involve disadvantages for an individual-either direct in the sense of “missed opportunities” or indirect in the form of costs that result from punishing wrongdoers. Concerning the latter, research shows that individuals seem to be willing to pay the costs of enforcing moral norms, e.g., through altruistic punishment [7]. Furthermore, the propagation of this strategy seems to increase with size [12] and social complexity [15] of a society. However, the fact that punishment is enforced also indicates that the temptation to trespass moral norms still exists, because the violator has gains-in particular, if the violation is not detected by anyone, e.g., the case of subtle cheating [18].Thus, a tension between moral reputation and moral action emerges: The former has a beneficial effect for the individual, as he or she becomes a respected member of the society. However, fulfilling moral standards when confronted with specific temptations imposes losses on the individual that he or she may try to avoid. This leads to moral hypocrisy: avoiding the cost of being moral while maintaining the appearance of morality. There is no reliable data on the prevalence of this behavior in different kinds of societal organization, but it can be expected that moral hypocrisy is a widespread phenomenon in modern societies where social control is less effective compared to small-scale societies [4] and where the “opportunity space” increases due to modern technologies such as the Internet [3]; dating Web sites allowing married persons to find additional sexual partners are apt examples. The potentially substantial prevalence of moral hypocrisy is corroborated by social psychology research [1,8,17] and by the everyday observation that exemplars of moral hypocrisy-e.g., if they concern sexual moral norms like adultery-attract a great deal of attention in popular media.In this study, we analyze moral hypocrisy from a modeling point of view by focusing on social strategies-examples are avoiding or disclosing hypocrites-that are integrated in a virtual
society aiming to counteract moral hypocrisy. This approach complements the current discussion on moral hypocrisy in social psychology that focuses either on the psychological factors of how individuals maintain a motivational state with the ultimate goal of appearing moral while, if possible, avoiding the costs to oneself of actually being moral [2], or why individuals’ evaluations of their own moral transgressions may differ substantially from their evaluations of the same transgressions committed by others [19]. The next section presents the model and its validation. The results section illustrates the effect of various combinations of social strategies on the prevalence of moral hypocrisy for four paradigmatic scenarios. The model implements these scenarios both individually, called non-diversity condition, and as combination, called diversity condition. The concluding section contains a discussion of the relevance of the results obtained for potential real-world strategies against moral hypocrisy. 2.2 The Moral Hypocrisy Model
2.2.1 Conceptualization of Moral HypocrisyOur model implements the conceptual idea of moral hypocrisy by distinguishing two different types of agent-states: the reputation of the agent, either morally good (G) or bad (B), and its disposition to act toward temptations, that is, either to be tempted (T) or to resist a temptation (R). The combinations of these states offer four different behaviors to the agents: appearing good and resisting a temptation (GR; “good guys”), appearing good but being tempted (GT; “hypocrites”), appearing bad and being tempted (BT; “bad guys”) and appearing bad but resisting temptations (BR; “inconsistent guys”). The model is spatial; the agents interact by comparing payoffs within their Moore neighborhood-the eight cells surrounding a central cell occupied by the agent on a two-dimensional square lattice-and follow, if allowed to do so, social strategies that may dislocate the agent on the lattice.
