Are leaders who change their moral stance perceived as brave or hypocritical?
Franco Greco • January 12, 2020
Research suggest that leaders who change their position on moral issues are not often perceived favourably by the public.
The Australian bushfires has raised anger and frustration towards political leaders. Whether the efforts by federal and state governments are timely and adequate in measure isn't the issue covered by this article.
This article seeks to report research on how public perceive political leaders who change their moral stance on issues.
Research on Leaders Shifting Moral Stance
A team led by Tamar Kreps at the University of Utah suggests that leaders who shift from a moral stance don’t appear brave – they just look like hypocrites.
The researchers conducted 15 studies. For example, one study, recruited 800 participants from Amazon Mechanical Turk and read scenarios where a member of the US Congress took a stance on either the death penalty or same-sex marriage. In some cases, their stance was pragmatic, indicated in their statement through phrases like “it’s a matter of not having to invest in the cost of changing government systems”. In other cases the justification for the stance was moral – “it’s a matter of justice.”
When the political leaders' initial stance was moral rather than pragmatic, the political leaders suffered costs and gained no benefits after changing their moral mind. Participants rated them as less effective, less worthy of support and more hypocritical, with the intensity of hypocrisy driving the other two negative judgments.
Even those participants who agreed with moral mind-changers’ new position saw them as hypocritical, although slightly less so than other participants.
At the same time, moral mind changers were seen as no more courageous, effective, or worthy of support, compared to leaders who changed their initial pragmatically grounded position.
Kreps’s team found this same effect in various scenarios, including a manager deciding whether to take on an environmentally friendly supply system and politicians considering immigration reform.
Implications of the Research
The results suggest that leaders abandoning a moral position will almost certainly cost them.
Changing a key belief may put you at odds with friends and family and be seized on by your competitors, casting you as a commitment-breaker – as dishonest or inauthentic.
Can Leaders Evolve?
However, the research cited one study that provided a “glimmer of hope” for evolving moral leaders. When participants heard that the leader’s moral shift was triggered by a transformative event (e.g. a disaster), they remained critical in terms of hypocrisy, but simultaneously rated them as more courageous.
Advice to Leaders
Much of the leadership literature to date has suggested there are only benefits to expressing moral positions, making this one of the first studies to show a potential downside, and – if leaders have an instinct for the effects shown here – it could explain why they are often keen to hold back from taking moral positions.
Kreps and her colleagues conclude that “moral talk is not cheap – those who deviate from their initial moral views pay a price…and leaders may do well to avoid it in the absence of true, enduring conviction.”
References
This material from this article draws significantly from Alex Fradera's article which can be found at:
https://digest.bps.org.uk/2018/07/31/political-and-business-leaders-who-change-their-moral-stance-are-perceived-not-as-brave-but-hypocritical-and-ineffective/
The research study and link is detailed below:
Kreps, T. A., Laurin, K., & Merritt, A. C. (2017). Hypocritical flip-flop, or courageous evolution? When leaders change their moral minds. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 113(5), 730–752. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000103
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