Cooperation is widespread in human societies, but its maintenance at the group level remains puzzling if individuals benefit from not cooperating. Explanations of the maintenance of cooperation generally assume that cooperative and non-cooperative behavior in others can be assessed and copied accurately. However, humans have a well known capacity to deceive and thus to manipulate how others ass...

Induced hypocrisy is considered as a new dissonance paradigm, in which two factors (normative commitment and mindfulness of past transgressions), are combined. The inconsistency between ‘what I am preaching’ and ‘what I have done’ is reduced via behavioral change in line with the prior preach. In this study, we compared two different operationalizations of commitment factor. In a paradigmatic c...

A recent study has found that autistic people donate the same to charity regardless of whether they are observed. This is not because they are oblivious to others, but because they are free of hypocrisy.

Compared to the conventional order of hypocritical actions—saying one thing and then doing another—merely reversing the order of these actions can mitigate whether an individual is judged to be a hypocrite (Barden, Rucker, & Petty, 2005). The present research examines how factors extraneous to a target’s own actions—specifically, group membership—influence hypocrisy judgments. Three experiments...

Collectively blaming groups for the actions of individuals can license vicarious retribution. Acts of terrorism by Muslim extremists against innocents, and the spikes in anti-Muslim hate crimes against innocent Muslims that follow, suggest that reciprocal bouts of collective blame can spark cycles of violence. How can this cycle be short-circuited? After establishing a link between collective b...

OBJECTIVE An intervention based on induced hypocrisy was conducted to reduce children's intentions to show fall-risk behaviors on playground equipment. METHODS To induce hypocrisy participants (7-12 years) advocated for safe-play behaviors while being made mindful about past failures to play safely on playgrounds. To measure the impact of the intervention, children created posters indicating ...

Engel (Grazer Philos Stud 77: 45–59, 2008) has insisted that a number of notable strategies for rejecting the knowledge norm of assertion are put forward on the basis of the wrong kinds of reasons. A central aim of this paper will be to establish the contrast point: I argue that one very familiar strategy for defending the knowledge norm of assertion—viz., that it is claimed to do better in var...