You Are Not Morally Superior

From NPR:

Image result for i'm such a good person gifA new study by Ben Tappin and Ryan McKay, forthcoming in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, follows previous work in finding that the tendency towards self-enhancement — towards judging ourselves “better than average” — is particularly acute in the moral domain. We think we’re more sociable and cooperative than average, but we’re especially inclined to think that we’re more honest and fair. The study takes a step beyond prior work, however, in trying to quantify the extent to which this moral self-enhancement might be justified.

The argument goes something like this. Not all self-enhancement is unjustified, because people have more information about themselves than they do about others…For their sample of 270 adult participants, Tappin and McKay quantified the extent to which self-enhancement was potentially justified by developing a model that took into account people’s judgments about themselves versus others across a range of 30 traits, the actual differences between self versus others in ratings for those traits, and people’s judgments about the desirability of each trait. Based on this analysis, they could estimate the extent to which self-enhancement was simply a consequence of making an uncertain inference about others, and the extent to which self-enhancement reflected a systematic bias to over-attribute desirable traits to oneself.

The analysis revealed that by and large, moral self-enhancement isn’t a simple consequence of drawing inferences from limited information. Whereas self-enhancement regarding social traits — such as sociability or warmth — could be entirely explained by the component of their model based on uncertain inference, moral self-enhancement went well beyond what could be justified in this way. In other words, the extent of people’s moral self-enhancement appears to be unjustified.

So why do we have such inflated egos?

Image result for i'm a good person gifOne possibility is that we over-attribute positive traits to ourselves because the hit in accuracy is compensated by a boost in wellbeing. Thinking of ourselves as honest and warm, this story goes, could make us feel better about ourselves and our lives. And given that moral characteristics are especially key to identity, the effect could be greater for moral traits than for traits of other kinds.

Consistent with this idea, the researchers found that the magnitude of unjustified self-enhancement for social traits (such as sociability and warmth) was positively associated with self-esteem. But for moral traits (such as honesty and fairness), this wasn’t the case: There was no association between the magnitude of unjustified self-enhancement for moral traits and participants’ self-esteem.

A second possibility is that people aren’t overestimating their own moral virtue, but instead underestimating the moral virtue of others. In this view, the hit in accuracy that comes from regarding others less favorably than ourselves is compensated by a decreased probability of making a costly error: the error of assuming another person will be honest or fair when they’re not. Mistakenly assuming that another person is sociable or warm, by contrast, is less likely to be deadly.

In other words, we lie to ourselves to make us feel better or we have seriously misjudged everyone else. Neither speaks well of us.