By MM Nongrum
The recent political situation in Meghalaya has been characterized by a long-standing series of issues including rampant corruption, defection, egoism, mendaciousness, and obfuscations to name a few. Sure, politicians are notorious for their hypocrisy but when does it stop if that is not a pipedream?
People hate hypocrites not because their beliefs and actions are inconsistent, but because their moral proclamations imply falsely that they are more virtuous than they really are. People are more likely to believe that someone does not waste energy if he or she says, “It is wrong to waste energy” than if he or she says “I do not waste energy.” We believe the moral assertions of hypocrites and we feel more let down when those assertions prove to be fallacious. And, perhaps expectedly, we’re harder on hypocrites when they belong to the opposite group.
Look at hypocrites from your own tribe, and the alternate explanations begin to creep in: “He/She is still new to this!” In fact, when the leader of a group gets caught behaving hypocritically, members of that group will rally behind the hypocritical leader, rather than abandon him/her. This might be one reason why we see some members of a political party continue to bolster their support for a leading politician from the party who is perceived as hypocritical, noting that’s the case for both sides of the same coin. They must support the politician because the group is such an important reflection of who they are and what they believe in.
Of course, the people of the society know hypocrisy when they see it, but do the hypocrites themselves? Do politicians or regular people realize when they’re contradicting themselves? First, it’s worth noting there are reasons for going back on a statement other than hypocrisy, like having a weak will, changing one’s mind, or realizing a lofty idea is just not practical. Hypocrisy’s tell-tale sign, meanwhile, is that holier-than-thou attitude, the haughty tsk-tsking from the gutter. You can’t attack people personally; people don’t typically realize when they’re being hypocrites, and they usually don’t stop after they’re called out for it, either. Instead, they might deny the accusation so they can “stay in a state of hypocrisy,”. Less commonly, hypocrites might acknowledge the inconsistency and either undo it or vow to do better. A certain politician could argue his/her comments away by saying this is just her job, or by saying everyone in his/her business says contradictory things sometimes, or by distorting perceptions of her own behaviour. “I’m not actually being hypocritical, this is different.”
People underestimate how much they’ll be condemned for being a hypocrite. The condemnation is painful, and if it’s painful enough, people might try to resolve the inconsistency by walking the talk, either by, say such as the case of recycling actually starting to recycle or by dropping the moralizing about separating plastics from cans. Is it different for politicians, though, whose psychological makeup often seems to have more in common with that of convicted felons than with educated members of society such as college students? Leadership positions make it more difficult to practice what you preach, because you may have to balance competing moral values.
Ultimately, an individual’s personality determines how much they are bothered by their own hypocrisy. One especially important factor is self-complexity, a psychological measure of the number of different “roles” that make up a person. Are you a spouse, mother, sister, and employee? Or just an employee? People who are lower in self-complexity have fewer self-perceived roles, and their defining qualities in those roles are pretty similar. They might be a serious wife, for example, and a serious boss. These individuals tend to take criticism more to heart. They see negative feedback in any one sphere as a reflection on their whole self, as opposed to just a small part of themselves.
In a 2010 Study, Allen McConnell, of Miami University, and Christina Brown, of Saint Louis University, asked college students to write about how much they valued study skills, then to describe all the times they slacked off. When the hypocrisy was pointed out, the students who were lower in self-complexity were more likely to change their attitudes to match their behaviour: They acknowledged studying was not very important, after all. “Because they view themselves in a more limited way, the sting of hypocrisy is more painful and therefore they’re more motivated to get rid of it by being consistent,” Brown said. Meanwhile, those with a lot of self-complexity doubled down on their attitudes about the importance of studying, even when the evidence of their own studying failures were laid bare.
Politicians always recount their past and that of their families as being small-business owners or stewards of the community. In other words, they portray a lot of self-complexity. So maybe when they’re called out for a contradiction in public, they can easily brush it off: After all, it’s only their public face that’s speaking.