Michael Hallsworth: Escaping the Hypocrisy Trap
From Boris Johnson's pandemic parties to climate change denial, the author of 'The Hypocrisy Trap' traces how exposed inconsistency poisons trust and how societies can balance calling out harmful behavior with tolerating human imperfection.
Today, we’re putting The Tonearm’s needle on author and behavioral scientist Michael Hallsworth.
Michael has spent the last two decades applying behavioral science to real-world problems at the Behavioural Insights Team. He’s held positions at Princeton, Columbia, Imperial College London, and the University of Pennsylvania.
Michael’s new book, The Hypocrisy Trap, takes on something we all recognize instantly but rarely understand: why we’re so quick to spot hypocrisy in others yet are blind to it in ourselves. He shows how our hunt for inconsistency has become a weapon in politics and daily life, one that actually breeds more of what it tries to eliminate. The book reveals why some hypocrisy might be unavoidable in functioning democracies, and how our relentless attacks on it can backfire in dangerous ways.
We talk about double standards, the psychology behind moral accusations, and why the most authentic-seeming politicians might be the most deceptive. Michael explains how we can tell the difference between hypocrisy that harms society and the everyday compromises that allow us to function together.
Dig Deeper
• Visit Michael Hallsworth at michaelhallsworth.com
• Purchase Michael Hallsworth’s The Hypocrisy Trap: How Changing What We Criticize Can Improve Our Lives from MIT Press, Penguin Random House, Bookshop, Barnes and Noble, or Amazon
• Michael Hallsworth and Elspeth Kirkman’s Behavioral Insights from MIT Press
• Connect with Michael Hallsworth on LinkedIn
• Behavioral Scientist column by Michael Hallsworth
Organizations and Institutions:
• The Behavioural Insights Team (BIT)—World-leading organization applying behavioral science in support of social purpose goals
• Dr. Michael Hallsworth at BIT
• Master of Behavioral and Decision Sciences Program at University of Pennsylvania
• Imperial College London
• Columbia University
• Princeton University
Key Concepts and Research:
• Behavioral economics and public policy—Michael Hallsworth’s Google Scholar profile
• Nature Human Behaviour—Journal featuring Hallsworth’s research
• Journal of Public Economics
• The Lancet
Historical and Philosophical References:
• Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution—Analysis of the French and American Revolutions
• Hannah Arendt on hypocrisy and the Reign of Terror—“Robespierre’s war upon hypocrisy transformed the ‘despotism of liberty’ into the Reign of Terror”
• The French Revolution Reign of Terror—Historical context
• Maximilien Robespierre—Key figure in the French Revolution
Political Examples Discussed:
• Boris Johnson’s COVID-19 party scandal—The “Partygate” scandal discussed in the episode
• Brexit and UK politics
Related Reading:
• “Our Hypocrisy Blind Spot” by Michael Hallsworth—Essay in Behavioral Scientist
• “The Future of Behavioral Insights Demands Human-Centered Design”—Hallsworth and Kirkman on behavioral science
• Hannah Arendt quotes on hypocrisy—“What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one”
```
(This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.)
Lawrence Peryer: What is behavioral science primarily concerned with? Where might a listener of ours see behavioral science in action in real life? Or how might a lay person encounter behavioral science?
Michael Hallsworth: Great question. Behavioral science is the structured study of how people behave in real-life situations. We might look at whether a particular message makes you more or less likely to turn up to your doctor's appointment on time. We might look at how the design of a hospital ER encourages people to wait without getting angry or annoyed. How does the design of the physical environment actually ensure you know where to go and you get a sense that you are going to be seen without waiting too long?
It's about these different factors in the environment, the kinds of messages or the inputs that we get, and how we react to them. The core insight is that it is true, sometimes we pay attention to all the information. We weigh up the costs and benefits of acting and choose the best course of action. But quite often we are using a set of mental shortcuts to navigate the world. What behavioral science tries to do is say you need to take those mental shortcuts into account when you are designing your hospital, when you are formulating your message.
Michael: That's what we try and do. We try to help people take those ideas into account to get a realistic sense of why people behave as they do.
Lawrence: Is it much like other fields where there's a clinical or an applied behavioral science as well as more of a theoretical or research-driven branch?
Michael: What I do is a lot of applied behavioral science, so it looks at a real-world service or process and says, how can we make it better? But you're right, there's also a theoretical side of it, which goes more into deeper questions of why do we act a particular way? How do we understand people's motivations when we are talking to them? These are questions that maybe academics look at, and they form the building blocks for how you do things differently in the real world.
Lawrence: How far back in our biological or cultural development do you have to look, either as a student of behavioral science or a practitioner? How much of this is just monkey brain? How much of it's cultural conditioning? What are the factors that you are studying and looking at?
Michael: In the book I dip into evolutionary psychology sometimes because the truth is that we have existed as a species for quite a long time now, and over that time, evolution has certain impacts on the way that we would behave. We are selected for certain traits that make you more likely to survive. I talk about that desire to punish free riding and unfairness coming from hunter-gatherer groups. But in a way, what I do is simpler than that. I try to look at running experiments. If you set up something this way, how do people act? If you set it up a different way, how do they act? Quite often, I'm not so concerned about the why, more just the result.
Michael: You can come up with various interesting explanations for why people do things. Otherwise, you would just be taking shots in the dark. We know that certain things are effective. Like in general, we respond to social norms. It's generally a good thing to be following the herd. There's an evolutionary reason for that. Sometimes saying what other people do can be a really powerful influence on our behavior. But not always. Sometimes if you think about giving blood, a message that says 99 percent of people have already given blood actually makes you less likely to give blood because you can free ride and say, well, I don't need to. So it's important to test these things in different settings to work out what's actually going to produce the intended result.
Lawrence: Before we jump more specifically into your book, can you tell me a little bit about the work you've been doing thus far in your career? What kinds of problems do you look at? What kinds of scenarios in the world do you study and try to address? Maybe as a way to bridge into the book, could you talk a little bit about how your work experience or the sum total of your previous work came to shape your understandings around human inconsistency?
Michael: The work I do is focused on social benefits. Rather than the private sector, we've tended to look at issues that affect society as a whole. Quick examples: we did work in San Francisco to say, how do you redesign intersections to minimize dangerous left turns where people are turning into pedestrians crossing? There are ways of doing this in terms of the actual physical environment, making slight tweaks to that. Then we measured it to see if people are actually driving more cautiously or slower after making these changes using a speed gun. So there's a physical environment thing. There's also a process thing. How do you make it easier for people to navigate a really difficult government system, for example? Quite often these things are not designed with an understanding of how people actually act. How can we make it simpler to claim a benefit, for example?
You might also be attempting to influence people in certain ways. I mentioned social norms, but one great example was we did some work around antibiotics, saying to doctors that they were actually outliers in their prescribing. They were prescribing antibiotics much more than people like them in their local area. That's different from a traditional approach where you pay people to do things, and we had no idea whether it would actually have an impact on people's behavior, let alone doctors. It turned out that those outliers reduced their overprescribing of antibiotics when they found out that they were outliers. The information had never been there for them or presented in that way.
Michael: So it's practical issues, thinking about what is a new way of thinking about behavior and how can something be set up differently to produce a benefit for the whole society.
How did I use this for my book? Well, there are a couple of ways that there's an overlap. The book talks about hypocrisy, and the idea of hypocrisy is one that we are really familiar with in our everyday lives. At the end of the book, I try to say, what should we do with everything I've learned about hypocrisy and why we are so furious with it? One of the things that I suggest we can do is indeed try to be more consistent. Find ways of being less likely to be hypocrites, of saying everyone should do something, or saying that I always do something and then actually not living up to what you are preaching.
There are actually quite a few things from behavioral science that help us be more consistent with our goals, and that was a really direct readacross. I can show these examples from commitment devices, increasing the costs to yourself of not meeting your goals, or things like this idea of induced hypocrisy where you basically point out to someone gently in private all the ways that they haven't lived up to their public pronouncements, and they go, oh wow, I should think about that. It can lead to changes in behavior. Those are all core behavioral science things that I could draw on to try and develop some solutions to this issue of hypocrisy.
Lawrence: You raised something here that I wanted to get to later, but while we're on the point, I really wanted to ask you about this. You made the comment a moment ago about addressing someone's hypocrisy with them in private, the difference in behavior that you get from the subject by addressing it in private versus a public shaming or naming, which oftentimes induces almost a defiance. I'm curious, what is that mechanism all about?
Michael: The unfortunate situation is that we like calling out hypocrites in public. One reason for that is it makes us look good ourselves. There's a status thing going on here, and I explain that I think a core driver of the whole hypocrisy trap is the desire for status and the desire to get status by taking down other people who you think are hypocritical.
The problem is that if you do that, we as humans have loads of really good defense mechanisms for denying the reality of the fact we've been inconsistent. We try to say it wasn't really inconsistency for all these reasons. We try to redefine what we've done. We say that maybe I didn't really care about that after all. We go on the attack and we say, but you are inconsistent as well, because we fear losing that kind of status and face you get from a claim to being consistent with principles, which is what I think you get if you make these kinds of claims that I always do X, not doing X is bad.
Instead, if you talk to people in private, you give them an off-ramp or more of an off-ramp. You don't get that defensiveness so much. You give them the space to think, oh, actually I wasn't very consistent with my public statements here, and what can I do differently? You get away from that reactance of maybe I don't care about it after all to a space of what can I do to actually change to get there in the future. It's bound up very much with our self-identity and our status, and doing it in private removes a lot of the stakes there.
I can give you some examples. If you talk to people about people who have made public statements about how you shouldn't use your phone while driving, that's more likely to have an impact if you tell people in private and then use technology to point out the inconsistency. It's actually harder when someone is sitting across the table judging you to take the right way out and say, oh, I'm going to do things differently. If it's a technological solution, it's virtual, it seems to be easier.
Michael: There's another experiment I talk about in France where they were asking people to sign a pledge about not using plastic bags in a supermarket. If people did that, they were less likely to use plastic bags. But if they were also asked to think of all the times when they had taken a plastic bag in public, they actually became more likely to take a plastic bag because they thought, well, maybe I use them and maybe I don't really care about this issue.
Lawrence: It's so fascinating. The mental justifications, which is something I want to get to again a little bit later. But I wanted to go back to the beginning of your book. I love the opening story involving your wife and your daughter and ultimately the British prime minister. I'm wondering if you could tell us that story, if you don't mind, and tell us about what that reveals as to just how early in life we recognize hypocrisy. When does the ability to recognize that and call it out begin?
Michael: The scene is after Christmas in 2021. We've just said to our daughter that we can't have any more dessert or sweet things. We've had too many of those recently. She's kind of disappointed, goes away into a different room, and then comes back ten minutes later and catches us eating Christmas pudding after saying we shouldn't. She says instantly, you're like the prime minister telling people not to have parties when he was having a party himself. This is the big scandal at the time with the prime minister, then Boris Johnson, who, it turned out, at least attended one party after making a big deal obviously that everyone should obey the COVID restrictions.
There are a few things to take away from this. One is that it's intuitive, this sense of seeing hypocrisy. I think it's intuitive because it comes from a sense of unfairness, which develops pretty young actually. As I mentioned, there are maybe evolutionary reasons for this. The sense that you are getting an unfair advantage, for example, by denying someone else something which you gain yourself. You are taking something that you denied other people. More generally, that feels like an unfair exchange because a lot of the time you are looking good yourself while also getting the goods. We just really don't like that.
Interestingly, with children as well, the thing is we accept that there should be different rules for children and for adults. We think children don't have the same sort of capacity as grownups to make decisions. What's really interesting as you grow up is you try to work out situations where the rules do or don't apply to grownups and to yourself as a child. That's why also becoming an adolescent is really hard because you're in a transition period.
I think there's something about also being a child, trying to work out the rules should be for everybody, but at the same time they're not. The other thing I take away from this is exposure of hypocrisy, particularly by people in authority, has long-lasting impacts and is really toxic. This scandal ultimately brought down the British prime minister about five months after it came out, and people at the time thought it was the hypocrisy that did for him. But it's had a really toxic aftermath as well because what you get now is people using that betrayal of trust as a reason not to do anything themselves and as a reason not to trust the government.
To give you an example, there was an article in the newspaper in the UK a couple of months ago, and it was about how people in the UK don't think climate change is such a big deal. We shouldn't really do so much for it now. Someone just says with no context, it's like COVID. I feel it's hypocritical. Governments are on private jets flying around doing things. Maybe it's actually not such a big deal because it's going to be like COVID when they're telling us to do things they're not prepared to do themselves.
I had a dual reaction to this. One was I completely get what you are saying and the anger here. But on the other hand, that feels like a very strange way of thinking that you should decide whether you think it's important based on the hypocrisy of a different issue later on. It can feel like an excuse. If it's easy not to do anything yourself, then you can just say, well, other people are hypocritical, so maybe I don't need to do anything. It was then I realized just the aftermath of how hypocrisy can really erode trust.
Lawrence: That's such a fascinating example because I find it very hard to summon the generosity of thinking to really empathize with that false equivalency between the hypocrisy in one area and then choosing to defy all logic and factual knowledge in another domain. It's so difficult, and I don't say that necessarily with pride. I can laugh about it, but I think it's a shortcoming that I can't accept that or at least acknowledge that to some extent. It could be just some mechanism that we have that it takes a lot to overcome, and you'd have to be aware of it and fight against it. But it's a perplexing and troubling reality that you uncover in that anecdote.
When you were talking about that notion around calling out hypocrisy as status, you also brought up this idea of false signals as opposed to just morality at stake. I wonder, could you unpack that a little bit for me? What's the distinction there you are getting at?
Michael: The first thing to say is that we think that hypocrisy is about morality, often about virtue, but it doesn't have to be. The experiments show this. You can be a hypocrite if you are actually concealing your virtues as well. Say you've got an image of being like a maverick or a rule breaker. Take a teenager who wants to look like they don't care about authority with their friends, and yet they go home and diligently do their homework. You can get status of various kinds. Or maybe take someone who owns an art gallery, is very comfortably upper-middle class, and feels that they have to praise works of art that are very transgressive and challenging to the sort of bourgeois establishment of which fundamentally they are a part. But actually they are repulsed by them, but they feel like they have to be discerning and say that it's incredibly great work of art. So your status can come through various kinds of claims. That's the first thing to say.
The point then is that a lot of the time what we don't like is the false signals of consistency that people send about whatever principle or status claim they are making. This is the reason we really don't like hypocrites. If you take an example of somebody who is talking about downloading music illegally—maybe an interesting example for your listeners as well—this is just one study that was actually done. There are two friends talking about downloading music illegally, and in this experiment people saw one of three endings. In one ending, they're told after condemning it, this person then goes and downloads music illegally. In the second ending, they say it's morally wrong to do it, and then they go and do it. In the third ending, they say it's morally wrong to do it, but sometimes I do it anyway, and then they go download music illegally.
The reason they do this experiment is in the first case, the person says no judgment, no opinion about downloading music illegally. In the second one, they condemn others for doing it. In the third one, they say it's wrong, but that they sometimes do it. It turns out that people judge obviously the second person much more harshly, but the third person is judged no worse than the person who says nothing.
The reason is that they've removed this kind of false signal. They've admitted that they maybe sometimes do it, so they're not claiming to be this signal of consistency. In case you're puzzling over this, it turns out that condemning others for doing something is actually a stronger signal that you don't do that thing than saying I never do it. If you say people who download music illegally are wrong and morally wrong, that actually gives people a stronger signal that you never do it than just saying I never download music illegally, which is really weird in some ways, but appears to be the case.
What you get with that third person is an honest hypocrite in a way. We don't judge them so harshly because they're not claiming to be better than they are. Yet they're still doing the same thing. They're still downloading music illegally. We're very sensitive to these false signals for the reasons I gave. If you are sending a false signal, it's effectively like you are cheating. You are getting the benefits of status of seeming to be consistent, and yet you haven't paid the cost for being consistent.
In case you are wondering about lying and the difference between lying and hypocrisy, not all lies are hypocritical. For example, if I say to you, Lawrence, did you steal that newspaper? And you say no, assuming you did, that's a lie, but it's not hypocritical. Whereas if you responded by saying, no, I would never steal a newspaper. People who steal newspapers are wrong and we should crack down on those people really harshly. You can see it starts becoming more hypocritical because you start sending a stronger signal of consistency that you are not the kind of person who would ever steal a newspaper. That's where the hypocrisy comes in. That's why it's about signals.
Lawrence: There are a couple of questions that are now a little bit blurred together for me, so I'm going to ask you maybe a couple of questions at once, if I may, because I feel as though they're related. This idea of the honest hypocrite, I think I understand a little bit better now about why honest hypocrisy works. But I'm also curious about how it differs from excuse making or justification. Similarly to that, what's the relationship between the honest hypocrite, the virtuous hypocrite, and the relatable hypocrite? Are they all in a family together?
Michael: You are right that this idea of honest hypocrisy is also a bit dangerous because you do it the wrong way and it comes across as complacency or just contempt almost. You could say, yeah, this is wrong, but you know, whatever. I do it anyway. So what.
Lawrence: It makes you kind of an everyman.
Michael: Or it can be like the rules don't apply to me.
Michael: That in its worst kind of formulation. So the better example of it is where you try to say the principle's important. The fact that I don't live up to it means I'm kind of imperfect, but I'm trying. I'm trying to get there. I do think it's important sometimes because if you think a principle or goal matters and you can't get there instantly, then that opens you up to the accusation of hypocrisy, which can shut down any attempts to do things better.
Just to return to the climate point, I think that's also a good example where there are so many things that we can do which technically aren't the most environmentally friendly thing, but if you say you care about it, then someone can just take you down by saying, oh, you say you care about it, but you do X. So I think this can lead to—this can create some space to get to a better place.
Your question about the honest hypocrite, the virtuous hypocrite, and the relatable hypocrite. The virtuous hypocrite is where somebody is actually better than they seem, like I mentioned, the teenager who goes and does their homework. The interesting thing there is we judge them less harshly even though we think they're bigger hypocrites because it turns out that they are not being consistent with their sort of maverick principles or whatever in private. I gave the example of one of the founders of the Ashley Madison website who actually turns out to be faithful to their own partner in their own life despite promoting infidelity.
Michael: The relatable hypocrite is basically a person who has multiple competing values and has to trade off against them. This is where we recognize that in our life we have many different commitments we've made or things that we value. I give the example of someone who's quite an ardent vegetarian, yet they go and see their grandmother who's really old, who's always made this kind of treasured meat stew. If they were not a hypocrite, they would say, no, I'm a vegetarian now. I won't touch this. Bring me something else. Yet they know that their grandmother would be super offended and really hurt and upset. We actually think it's the better thing to do to sort of pick at the vegetables in the stew and say nothing.
That's the reasonable hypocrite, trading off the values of being consistent with their principles against hurting their grandmother. So the difference between that and an honest hypocrite is an honest hypocrite comes out and says that they don't live up to the values. They come out and say about the inconsistency as a way of getting to a better place, which is slightly different from those other scenarios.
Lawrence: When you were talking earlier about the different rules for children versus adults, I have grown children now, and I still remember quite vividly, you were evoking a lot of moments for me. I can't help but think that shortly after they learn to ask why, they learn to say that's not fair. It's a very early impulse. But more importantly, it's not clear why there are two standards. If the child can't have more candy, it's because the candy's not good for them in high doses. If the family can't have more candy, it's because it's not good for any of us in high doses. But if the adults can have more candy when the kid's not around, it's a great example of how that hypocrisy is actually really dangerous because as the child you say, well, are you telling me the candy's not dangerous? Or is there some scientific reason why the candy's only dangerous for me and not you? Are you lying to me about the world? It's a small matter that creates a lot of mistrust and can actually be formative and damaging long-term.
Michael: The way I talk about this in the book is separating out different kinds of status claims. This is where we start thinking about evolution again. It's generally thought that there are at least two kinds of status claims. One's a prestige status and one's a dominance status. Prestige status is more like what can you do? Your skills, your abilities. What can you do for me? Whereas dominance status is more like how strong are you? How much can you hurt me? What can you do to me? Not what can you do for me?
Michael: We accept double standards quite a lot of the time with prestige status. For example, we might accept that a singer who's become very famous through her vocal talent gets certain things like getting to go into shops early before they open, whatever. That's not seen as so hypocritical, even though there's special treatment. Sometimes we think special treatment should be earned. Whereas what is going on with what you are saying is you are feeling like the special treatment is not earned. The status privilege is not justified in some ways. So you think actually what's going on is a dominance strategy of just you're telling me what to do just because you can.
I say that quite often, double standards hypocrisy is when a dominance strategy is dressed up as a prestige claim. Just to unpack that a second, you are actually wanting to be special, but as a power play, not because it's deserved. If it was just a power play out in the open, then we wouldn't think it's hypocritical. If we thought that the prestige claim was deserved, like the singer getting special treatment, we wouldn't think it's hypocrisy. It's when the two things get combined together. We get the parent-child thing and we get all these other kinds of things. I found this super interesting because again, once you start unpacking these ideas, when we say status, we mean more than one thing. Quite often. Just like hypocrisy, we mean more than one thing.
Lawrence: It's the kind of status that ends in "because I told you so."
Michael: Exactly.
Lawrence: Even as a parent, when those words leave your mouth, you know how hollow and wrong it is. It's oftentimes a shorthand for I'm not going to explain this to you right now, or I don't want to have to explain this to you right now. Or I just wanted the chocolate pudding.
Michael: The funny thing is that although it might be sort of morally indefensible, that kind of thing can have good results for children because sometimes they just need to be given some clarity on the situation that there is a double standard here, and unfortunately that's how it is. Whereas if you try and say, look, no, you are on the same level as me, that can be really difficult as well.
Lawrence: I can remember reading parenting advice and articles and books and things where in that scenario the advice might have been explain to your child that the adults are having the treat because it was a reward for working hard all day. When you grow up and work hard all day, you can have a reward as well. (laughter) But then you could see how that creates a whole other different weird incentive around, now you're developing this fixation with rewards. I'm only going to work hard because I know there's a reward on the other side, not because there's some virtue in it. It's all so weird.
Michael: It's so interesting. In the book, I'm saying there's no one weird trick for hypocrisy. Trying to stamp it out completely actually leads to really bad places, as well as tolerating it completely leads to really bad places. As a parent also, you've got to keep that balance of explaining why you are doing something is a good thing. If you just go too far and just say no, arbitrarily—this dominance strategy, I'm right and it's just how it is—that actually has bad effects. But going to the extreme the other way, just saying whatever you want, is really bad as well. So it's these uncomfortable bouncing around in the middle areas that I think are really interesting. That's why I'm doing the book, to explain what's the guide for tolerating some forms of hypocrisy and calling out other ones.
Lawrence: While we're on that point, it's really the central, not thesis, but the central issue you are sort of wrangling with in the book—this idea of we can't all walk around as scolds and persecuting people any more than we can simply abide by any kind of unguided, unprincipled behavior. I'm curious, could you talk a little bit about the counterproductive repercussions of this constant identifying and going after the hypocrite?
Michael: The book's called The Hypocrisy Trap. When I say that to people, I think the instant reaction is, oh, the trap is being hypocritical.
Lawrence: And you've been caught. (laughter)
Michael: You've fallen. You've trapped me. That's actually not the main thing. I mean, as I mentioned earlier, the book does talk about how to be more consistent with our goals and we use various behavioral science approaches to do that. But actually the trap is more about what happens when criticisms of hypocrisy get out of control.
Some calling out of hypocrisy is healthy. It protects shared standards, it preserves trust. We want to avoid the kind of thing that we saw with Boris Johnson and the COVID lockdown parties for all the reasons I said of the toxic destruction of trust. In the book, I call this the trust machine. When it's working well, then we call out hypocrisy and politicians, for example, know that there's an incentive to tell the truth because if they don't, they'll get called out for being hypocrites, whatever.
At the same time, we also know in our lives that some letting go of inconsistency and hypocrisy is necessary and healthy too, because life involves trade-offs, involves imperfection, imperfect steps forward. There's something cold and hard and inhuman about the drive to eliminate all kind of hypocrisy. So I talk about then this other scenario called everyday compromises, where it kind of works pretty well. We don't have complete consistency. We decided to make certain trade-offs. People are quite forgiving of each other, and yet here come the bad things.
For a start, if you take the criticisms too far and you say that every kind of inconsistency is punished, you end up with something I call the purity regime. People feel like they can't even voice any principles because they're worried about someone calling out some minor inconsistency, or they have to pretend like they are following everything exactly. There's a good historical analogy here in the French Revolution, the reign of terror, which Hannah Arendt called a relentless hunt for hypocrites. So that's when your criticisms go too far.
But then there's a final thing that can happen where you basically end up in a world where no one cares about hypocrisy, where you don't criticize it at all, perhaps because the concept has become exhausted. We have so many accusations that everything's hypocrisy, so nothing is. So what are you going to do about it? I'm a hypocrite. The difference is I'm stronger than you, so I can just do what I want. Are you going to stop me? So what if I'm a hypocrite? I call that world brazen power plays, and that's really a bad world as well, but it's the opposite of the purity regime.
No one cares about hypocrisy, and so you have to—you want to end up in those two good worlds of the trust machine and everyday compromises and avoid the two bad worlds of the purity regime and brazen power plays. You do that by not overusing the accusations of hypocrisy. That can lead to a world where either hypocrisy is everything or it's nothing, and they're both very bad places.
Lawrence: Are there any historical examples, either at the societal level or even more of a microcosm, like within an institution, say at a university or department somewhere, or community where the hypocrisy trap, where the community evolved beyond it? What's the other side of falling into the trap look like? How is stability regained, reestablished, or is it not?
Michael: The way I think about it is that we have to resist the temptation to call out even the slightest inconsistencies as hypocrisy because sometimes, particularly in politics, your accuser has an agenda. Quite often the accuser wants to look good themselves, and hypocrisy is a really good way of damaging another person. Again, I'm not excusing hypocrisy all the time. I want to make that really clear. I'm not condoning deception and lying and kind of malign intent. I think there's a ratcheting effect of accusations that we've been seeing, maybe also because of social media, because social media gives you a vastly increased number of traces of someone's behavior and statements and also gives you a vastly increased number of platforms to make accusations. The two things are kind of related, the accusation and the perceived hypocrisy.
Your question is actually a really good one in terms of how do you emerge from the other side. One way to answer is the purity regime setup is inherently unstable. In the reign of terror, that collapsed in the end, and it reached a pitch at the end that Robespierre himself got executed. Then everyone just calmed down a bit because they realized you couldn't be completely consistent. It wasn't so much about ideological purity.
Then I think the brazen power plays is actually just an unproductive world in which it's like a state of nature. Everybody's scrambling for an advantage. It can lead to complete chaos and breakdown because there are no governing institutions and rules. It's just a struggle to get as much as you can with force. For the same reasons that we exited that kind of world at some point, we saw that there were advantages to cooperation. I think that's how you get out of it. But I'll tell you, that's the first time anyone's asked me that question. It's a really good one. I hadn't thought about it. How do you exit those bad worlds? They're really hard to exit sometimes because they get locked in.
Lawrence: Well, of course, it's a loaded question because it's one lens through which to view our current—certainly in America, our current—situation. It's, I would think all roads would lead to that question. It's interesting when you use the political examples. Your Boris Johnson example is actually really a great case in point because with politicians and in politics, they're not a clean experiment in that it's hard to isolate the other variables. If he had been the most popular politician in the history of prime ministers, he may have been able to weather it. Or if he had come out and simply said, you know, it was a stupid thing to do, but it was the holidays. I didn't know what the—I've never been through a pandemic before. It was just foolish of me. I would venture to guess that even if he was the least popular politician in the history of prime ministers, if he had done that, people would've said, yeah, it was stupid, Boris, but you're right. I mean, we've never been through a pandemic either. Don't do that again.
Michael: Do you know what? One reason it was so toxic for him was because his whole reputation and his whole appeal was kind of based on breaking rules and being irreverent. He kind of came to power by saying, oh, it's all really difficult, the situation around Brexit and whatever. I'm just going to sort it. His whole personality was, oh, I'm a straight talker and I'll just kind of bust through all these bureaucrats and so on. So his appeal was like rule breaking almost, or being different. Then when it was his own rules, because he was put in a position where he had to be the one making the rules, all the stuff that was a strength became completely inverted. All the stuff that was his big appeal was turned around into a massive lack of appeal because he had been the one put in the position of making rules.
That's a really difficult thing about politics because particularly if you get power, you have to say that you really believe in your principles quite a lot of the time. We want politicians who stand up for what they believe in. We demand that. Yet at the same time, we kind of demand they get something done. Why can't you just compromise? People love bipartisanship and so on. So we kind of flip between these almost contradictory demands from politicians without admitting that's what we are doing.
Michael: So we are kind of part of this system that is created and we still get to blame the politicians all the time.
Lawrence: I really love your identification of that notion of purity as being such a big part of the problem as well. Because it's a toxic notion across so many domains. It doesn't leave room for making mistakes. It doesn't leave room for compromise. It doesn't leave room for grace. It winds up excluding so many people who might score eight out of ten on your scorecard, but because of the other two, they just don't get to participate anymore. And it treats all infractions equally. There's no difference between a mortal and a minor infraction.
Michael: That's really true, but you also have to be careful with the other side of it. If you become too accustomed to giving yourself a break and sort of saying, I'm basically a good person, I just failed this time, then you actually open the door to complacency and even cruelty in the end because you could start ignoring all these consequences of your actions. Strategically, I talk about the zealot's view of the world where it's like you have to be completely consistent, and they would say every evil ignored is an evil you tolerate it, and they kind of have a point there. It can just be like, I'm fine. I'm basically a good person. Then you slip back into bad world through the other route. You've got to—this is why it's so slippery. You can't just say, oh, purity is bad because also compromise can be bad as well if it's taken too far.
Lawrence: It's so incredible. It's the central tension, I feel like, of our time. But maybe it's been the central tension of all time. When people, once agriculture started. When you were researching the book and as you embarked into it, did you have a fully formed thesis when you sat down to write the book? Could you talk about some of the challenges to your assumptions or learnings that emerged for you throughout the process of creating the book?
Michael: I actually didn't have the concept of the hypocrisy trap formed when I started writing it. That wasn't the title of the book or anything. I hadn't worked all that in advance. I just knew that hypocrisy was a really interesting topic. There was no book on it, and yet it's so essential to our everyday judgments and lives.
It was only about halfway through that I realized that this idea of the trap was the central kind of idea of the book and should be the title and everything. Because it kind of came up as a more minor point in the book, and then I realized it was the big organizing principle of the book. So that only came quite late, and it required me to sort of change the structure. The central insight was that the accusations are the important thing.
I think that made everything else work, although when I'm on a podcast or whatever, it takes me a while to explain that because people are like, what? The accusations are the interesting part? And I'm like, yeah, but I had to sit looking at a wall for a long time to realize that was the case, but then everything else becomes unlocked and it makes sense about how they kind of join together, the accusations and the hypocrisy itself. So it was a voyage of discovery for me as well, but it was an incredibly interesting one because I got to range across, you know, literature, philosophy, history, politics, The Simpsons, all these kinds of issues with this one guiding concept of hypocrisy.
Lawrence: So the initial notion for the book was sort of an exploration or a history of hypocrisy or…
Michael: It was basically something about the concept and how it, the behavioral science and the new research that's come out because the last fifteen years actually had had a bunch of new studies which no one really knows about to do with the psychology of hypocrisy. They're not ones you read about in your typical pop science book, which is why I was really motivated to give them the light of day. So it was going to be about that. New insights into this old concept.
Lawrence: That was something that was very fascinating. You mentioned it a couple of times in the book about how—I don't want to say it's a recent field of inquiry, but that the more insightful studies are much more recent. This is not a field that had been fully mined.
Michael: We spent a long, long time, centuries, talking about hypocrisy in terms of religion and maybe philosophers were talking about it. It was about in terms of weakness of will and stuff. But it was only about fifteen years ago that actually anyone started to ask people what they thought it was. That's a really big issue because it's not like you are studying the outer regions of the solar system where people's views are interesting, but they're not going to necessarily predict the movement of the planets or whatever. Hypocrisy, fundamentally, is what we use it for. It is what we think it is.
You spent a lot of time in the centuries before with people saying, oh, it's about virtue. Obviously in the book I talk about the very brief history of it, how it became religious. Originally it was about play acting on the stage, but Jesus was really against hypocrisy. Then we started getting more kind of secular notion of it around the Enlightenment of you can also be deceiving yourself, or you know, it's not necessarily about someone trying to deliberately lie to others, which is what the idea had been. But none of this had really actually taken a scientific approach of how do people react to it, what do they think it is, until about ten, fifteen years ago. That was a massive revelation to me.
Lawrence: It's very intriguing that the simple act of doing the sort of field study of talking to people about their experience of hypocrisy or their perceptions and thoughts on it. You mentioned earlier this notion of how we have to become more discerning about hypocrisy, both how we react to it, how we call it out, what we tolerate, what we don't. I'm curious, I think I'm going to do the thing that must be the most annoying thing. I'm going to ask you for some prescription or guidance. Someone reads your book, it gets them to reflect on their own hypocrisies. What's your advice? How do you counsel them to navigate that gap while still balancing their principles, living a practical life amongst other people?
Michael: I'm going to try to sum this up quickly. One is there are techniques to become less of a hypocrite, and I won't talk about them all. I mentioned some of them. The second one is anticipating how people are going to judge your actions. I try and lay out very clearly what are the things that really annoy people and ratchet up the sense of hypocrisy. We actually know this from studies, so there's almost a protective thing you can do yourself to try and reduce the risk of being called out as a hypocrite.
But then the final thing is changing the view of hypocrisy, and I have some simple things here. When we see an accusation of hypocrisy, try to think what's the real harm involved here? You'll see a lot of accusations of some kind of inconsistency labeled as hypocrisy because people know it will get people riled up. So think what is the person's motivation in making this accusation of hypocrisy and how substantive is the thing going on here? Because a lot of the time it's used for very minor things. You should be thinking, is hypocrisy the real issue here or is there something else underneath it? That's the real issue. That's getting people annoyed. Do we need to be having this conversation about hypocrisy?
Is it about something else? And hypocrisy is just laid on to make me angry and to get my attention because it's really good for doing that. It's the thing that a politician can use against their opponent to get the most damage in a short space of time. So what's going on? Don't just think about the hypocrisy, think about the accusation, because that's part of the whole system as well.
Author
Michael Hallsworth, PhD, is a leading figure in applying behavioral science to real-world challenges. For the last 20 years he has been an official and an advisor for governments around the world. The coauthor of the book Behavioral Insights, he built a 250-person consultancy business and has held positions at Princeton University, Columbia University, Imperial College London, and the University of Pennsylvania.
