Moral Hypocrisy in Moral Dilemma

Moral hypocrisy is a phenomenon in which individuals evaluating other people's moral transgressions differ from their evaluations of the same transgressions enacted by themselves. The present study examined whether there is a moral hypocrisy when participants take different roles in moral dilemma. We found that although participants' decisions were no different when they taking different roles in moral dilemmas, the participants in the role of a protagonist took more time to make a decision. These results demonstrated that there may be an implicit moral hypocrisy in moral dilemmas and supported the view that it is the volitionally-guided justifications that results in hypocrisy.