The MIT Press / Big Think
Key Takeaways
- Hypocrisy can sometimes boost credibility when the underlying actions are seen as genuinely admirable.
- People often prefer relatable, imperfect messengers over virtuous do-gooders who feel unapproachable.
- Strong moral stances retain persuasive power even when violated because they signal integrity.
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Adapted from The Hypocrisy Trap: How Changing What We Criticize Can Improve Our Lives by Michael Hallsworth. Published by MIT Press. Copyright © 2025. All rights reserved.Sometimes accusations of hypocrisy fail to hit home: People don’t seem too bothered by them. Here are four cases that start to unpick the view that we simply hate hypocrisy and instead show that there’s something else going on.
The virtuous hypocrite
Noel Biderman founded Ashley Madison, a website designed to enable affairs. What if he were faithful in his private life, despite publicly promoting infidelity? Such a scenario contains what many consider the main ingredients of hypocrisy: failing to practice privately what one preaches publicly.
A study tested whether people would agree. It showed one group of people an article about Biderman that simply mentioned he had promoted adultery; a separate group saw the article with additional information that it had been discovered that Biderman was personally faithful in private.
As expected, this second group rated Biderman as much more hypocritical, but they also saw him in a much more positive and praiseworthy light. Discovering hypocrisy doesn’t always move judgments in a negative direction. You can benefit from an action that creates hypocrisy if people think it is admirable on its own terms.
This may seem like a contrived example. Surely people go around concealing their vices, not their virtues? But hypocrisy is not just about morality—it’s about claims to self-image or status of various kinds. Say you build your personal or corporate brand as a freethinking maverick. If it turns out that you have always played by the rules, that will mark you as an inauthentic hypocrite who nonetheless does the right thing.
The relatable hypocrite
Not practicing what you preach may make that preaching more effective. For example, some doctors emphasize their commitment to exercising and being healthy. It turns out that doing this goes down badly with overweight people who are concerned about their weight. They are more likely to avoid fitness-focused doctors because they worry that such doctors will be disapproving and judgmental. Sedentary doctors may be hypocrites, but that’s okay if you think it makes them more relatable or insightful about the struggle to be healthy — or if your main fear is being looked down on.
It’s unfortunate that overweight and obese doctors are the least likely to discuss weight loss with patients and feel less confident in doing so. They may not realize that they can be the most effective advocates for those in greatest need. Instead, fear of appearing hypocritical may be holding them back. Important things are left unsaid.
This dislike of the virtuous reflects a tendency called “do-gooder derogation.” We can feel resentful when others get social credit, since their rise lowers our relative standing. If that person is then exposed as a hypocrite, our fury intensifies. Yet this same tendency can lead us to prefer fallible hypocrites over unyielding zealots — if they are upfront about their flaws.
Take climate activists. Imagine that you are talking to someone who claims that they are in the top 1% for efficiency of household energy consumption, doesn’t eat meat or cheese, and avoids flying. How credible would you find them as an advocate for making changes in your own behavior?
It turns out that this person isn’t more effective than someone whose energy consumption is only in the top 50 percent for efficiency, who has cut down but not stopped eating meat, and who just avoids flying whenever possible. In fact, the ultra-sustainable person is slightly less persuasive. They are seen as extreme and unrelatable, even though they are living up to their principles fully.
The principled hypocrite
Big claims can bring benefits. Leaders who make moral arguments seem more authentic and inspire more commitment in their followers. Caring about issues makes you seem like you have integrity and can be trusted. Do all these benefits just evaporate when hypocrisy comes to light?
New evidence suggests not. In fact, if someone states their principles strongly and then falls short, they may end up looking better than someone who gives more pragmatic messages from the start.
This finding emerges from a study where people were asked to judge a fictional politician from the party they supported. One group heard that he had taken a firm position that lying is never okay. The other group was told that he had stated a more flexible position: that “it’s sometimes okay to lie.” Everyone then discovered that the politician had lied about the source of his campaign donations.
When he had taken a strong stance on lying, he was (unsurprisingly) rated as more hypocritical. What’s interesting, however, is that he was also seen as more moral, and people were more inclined to vote for him than his flexible incarnation! It seems that the benefits of having staked out a clear moral position were not completely lost when it was violated.
To be clear: The hypocritical politician did go down in people’s estimation. There was a hypocrisy penalty. It’s just that the pragmatic politician had already taken an even bigger hit by not committing to absolute moral principles up front. People disliked someone saying “it’s sometimes okay to lie” so much that even the exposure of the moral politician as a hypocrite didn’t bring him down to the same level. What seems to be happening here is that people trust the person’s original strong stance as a reliable signal that they will be honest in the future, even if their behavior doesn’t show that. Even repeated lies don’t seem to shift that perception. In contrast, a flexible stance seems to give the general impression that you are a slippery person.
The reasonable hypocrite
Anyone who has run a business or a team will know the constant pressure to balance values, priorities, and commitments that conflict with each other. You may genuinely believe in a range of jostling principles; different parts of your life can bring varying demands.
Viewed this way, avoiding hypocrisy can be like asking us to be faithful to one thing at the expense of all others. That expectation can seem unrealistic and unreasonable. Take the case of an ardent vegetarian who politely praises their grandmother’s treasured meat stew when it appears in front of them. On the one hand, they believe in vegetarianism; on the other, they can’t bear to insult and upset their grandmother. Only 30% of people think that this behavior is hypocritical, perhaps because they think the vegetarian has done the right thing. We tell white lies all the time.
Indeed, making these trade-offs may be seen as the decent, human thing to do. The philosopher Peter Singer has been an advocate for acting according to rules that are counterintuitive and unemotional. For instance, he believed that euthanasia could be justified in some cases of dementia. Yet when his own mother became severely ill with Alzheimer’s disease, he and his sister paid for a team of helpers to look after her at home. That decision seems more like a reason to praise Singer than to condemn him.
As he said, “Perhaps it’s more difficult than I thought before, because it’s different when it’s your mother.”
Given the shifting range of demands we face, what some people push as hypocrisy may start to look like a reasonable compromise. Many media stories consist solely of claims about someone’s inconsistency, even if those claims are tenuous. An animal rights activist accepts a drug tested on animals to save her own life. A tech CEO strictly limits his children’s access to the products he built. Working too hard to get outrage in this way may just lead people to shrug and think, “So what?”
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