Hypocrisy: How Evolution Guarantees Human Inconsistency
Robert Kurzban
Assistant Professor of Psychology
You’re a hypocrite. Don’t worry. Everyone else is too.
Recent events provide a vivid example of hypocrisy – endorsing some view, usually moral condemnation, and then acting in direct opposition to it.
Imagine an organism whose words and actions were generated by one single central, unified system. Saying and doing, having the same cause, would have the same effects.
Accumulating evidence in psychology shows that this imaginary organism is not the human organism. For this reason, the search for something we can neatly call the “self” – the unified author of word and deed – is misguided. There are good (evolutionary) reasons for this. Brains, like bodies, consist of specialized systems with different functions. Not only that, but some of these systems operate at more or less cross-purposes – the bit of your brain that likes cheeseburgers struggles with the bit of your brain that likes to be healthy. Consequently, it is a virtual certainty that if one looks at all of a given individual’s actions over time, because they are severally caused, they are guaranteed not to be mutually consistent.
This does not, of course, mean that we should not hold people accountable for hypocrisy. It does, however, suggest that we should not be surprised by it.