Why Moral Leaders Are Annoying

Josh Rothman in the Boston Globe (via 3QD):

Moral leadership is challenging for an obvious reason -- you have to know what's right and wrong. But it's also difficult because, on the whole, people are ambivalent about moral crusaders. Now there's a name for that strange mixture of admiration, guilt, and defensive dismissiveness you feel when you encounter someone better than you: it's called "anticipated reproach," and Benoît Monin, a psychologist at Stanford, has studied it in a number of fascinating experiments. His essential finding: The more we feel as though good people might be judging us, the lower they tend to fall in our regard. As he explains in a recent paper, coauthored with Julia Minson of Wharton, "overtly moral behavior can elicit annoyance and ridicule rather than admiration and respect" when we feel threatened by someone else's high ethical standards. ...

Once you know how to spot it, "anticipated reproach" is everywhere, and it bedevils people who want to lead morally. Argue on behalf of an environmental cause, and non-environmentalists, anticipating your moral reproach, will think you're stuck-up and self-righteous. Often, the anticipated reproach -- driven, as it is, by fear -- is exaggerated and caricatured: vegetarians, Monin finds, aren't nearly as judgmental of meat-eaters as meat-eaters think they are. Unfortunately, one or two genuinely judgmental do-gooders can put everyone else on a hair-trigger, twisting discussion about moral issues into a vicious circle, in which both parties anticipate reproaches from one another, and put each other down in advance.

What's to be done? Monin argues that we need to keep in mind one of the classic lessons of social psychology: Our moral views are all tangled up in our social lives. If we're going to talk with one another about moral issues, we need to cultivate an awareness of the ways in which social hierarchies and interpersonal tensions cloud our judgments. And it helps, of course, to have a name for a feeling. Once you know what it's called, it's easier to stop doing it.

Comments

[Radha Kunke]

really liked this piece... and it is so true. The moment one comes across someone with what we think are "better" morals, we begin feeling resentful, guilty and generally rejected and rejecting. In that itself a stand by anyone defeats itself as it alienates all those who do not agree or feel the same way... yet one has to make these stands and vocalize what one feel to be right or wrong.