A dynamic perspective on moral choice: Revisiting moral hypocrisy

We propose a dynamic model of moral decision making whereby people revise their morally relevant preferences as their options evolve. We employ this model to reinterpret prior findings on moral hypocrisy. In particular, we revisit the finding that, when tasked to assign themselves and another person to tasks that differ in pleasantness, participants who “flip a coin” to determine the task allocation assign themselves to the preferable task more than fifty percent of the time. This result was originally thought to reveal that people will take moral credit for flipping a coin while simultaneously harboring the intention of disregarding its outcome if it is negative. We suggest instead that people flip the coin not with the intention of disregarding the outcome, but with the hope of maximizing their self-interest without self-reproach (Studies 1 and 2); only when this outcome proves unachievable do they resort to rationalizing their self-interested assignment (Studies 3 and 4). These findings offer a novel perspective on the flexibility of moral decisions.