Order of actions mitigates hypocrisy judgments for ingroup more than outgroup members

Abstract

Compared to the conventional order of hypocritical actions—saying one thing and then doing another—merely reversing the order of these actions can mitigate whether an individual is judged to be a hypocrite (Barden, Rucker, & Petty, 2005). The present research examines how factors extraneous to a target’s own actions—specifically, group membership—influence hypocrisy judgments. Three experiments provided consistent evidence that reversing the order of statement and behavior mitigated hypocrisy judgments to a greater extent when observers judged ingroup targets compared to outgroup targets. This pattern was observed across two distinct groups (i.e., gender and political party). In addition, mediational evidence suggested that the greater mitigation for ingroup targets stemmed from the observer’s greater tendency to make attributions that ingroup targets had genuinely changed for the better.