View article

Although two people could both enact similar forms of hypocrisy, one person might be judged as more hypocritical than the other. The present research advances a novel, theoretical explanation for a paradigmatic instance of this: the increased hypocrisy ascribed to contradicting a morally (vs. nonmorally) based attitude. In contrast to prior explanations, the present research shows that people infer targets holding morally (vs. nonmorally) based attitudes are more difficult to change. Consequently, when people are hypocritical on these stances, it elicits greater surprise, which amplifies the perceived hypocrisy. Through both statistical mediation and experimental moderation, we provide evidence for this process and show how our explanation generalizes to understanding heightened hypocrisy in other contexts, too (i.e., violating nonmoral attitudes held with certainty vs. uncertainty). Altogether, we provide an …