Thursday, December 31, 2009
Theory and Practice
Theory
Practice
Strategic defaults – conditioning, morality, or naïveté?
Why Powerful People -- Many of Whom Take a Moral High Ground -- Don't Practice What They Preach
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Three additional experiments further examined the degree to which powerful people accept their own moral transgressions versus those committed by others. In all cases, those assigned to high-power roles showed significant moral hypocrisy by more strictly judging others for speeding, dodging taxes and keeping a stolen bike, while finding it more acceptable to engage in these behaviors themselves.
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Galinsky noted that moral hypocrisy has its greatest impact among people who are legitimately powerful. In contrast, a fifth experiment demonstrated that people who don't feel personally entitled to their power are actually harder on themselves than they are on others, which is a phenomenon the researchers dubbed "hypercrisy." The tendency to be harder on the self than on others also characterized the powerless in multiple studies.
"Ultimately, patterns of hypocrisy and hypercrisy perpetuate social inequality. The powerful impose rules and restraints on others while disregarding these restraints for themselves, whereas the powerless collaborate in reproducing social inequality because they don't feel the same entitlement," Galinsky concluded.
Practice
Strategic defaults – conditioning, morality, or naïveté?
In the report, White noted comments by the former Treasury Secretary on one of the hottest housing market topics of the day – strategic defaults:
The worst criticism has been reserved, however, for those who would walk away from mortgages that they can afford. Typical of such criticism is that of Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson, who declared in a televised speech: “And let me emphasize, any homeowner who can afford his mortgage payment but chooses to walk away from an underwater property is simply a speculator – and one who is not honoring his obligations.”
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Maybe the rules are different for big banks than for homeowners.
