单选题 Scientists have long bickered over whether hypocrisy is driven by emotion or by reason. The role of emotion in moral judgments has upended the Enlightenment notion that our ethical sense is based on high-minded philosophy and cognition.
In a new study that will not exactly restore your faith in human nature, psychologists David DeSteno and Piercarlo Valdesolo of Northeastern University instructed 94 people to assign themselves and a stranger one of two tasks, an easy one, looking for hidden images in a photo, or a hard one, solving math and logic problems. The participants could make the assignments themselves, or have a computer do it randomly. Then everyone was asked, how fairly did you act?, from "extremely unfairly" (1) to "extremely fairly" (7). Next they watched someone else make the assignments, and judged that person's ethics.
Selflessness was a virtual no-show. 87 out of 94 people opted for the easy task and gave the next guy the onerous one. Hypocrisy, however, showed up with bells on. every single person who made the selfish choice judged his own behavior more leniently—on average, 4.5 vs. 3.1—than that of someone else who grabbed the easy task for himself, the scientists will report in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
The gap suggests how that kind of hypocrisy is possible. For one thing, people's emotions might have gotten the better of them. When we judge our own transgressions less harshly than we judge the same transgressions in others, DeSteno said, it may be because "we have this automatic, gut-level instinct to preserve our self-image. " Adds Dan Batson of the University of Kansas, a pioneer in hypocrisy studies, "people have learned that it pays to seem moral, since it lets you avoid censure and guilt. But even better is appearing moral without having to pay the cost of actually being moral" —such as assigning yourself the tough job.
To test the role of cognition in hypocrisy, DeSteno had volunteers again assign themselves an easy task and a stranger an onerous one. But before judging the fairness of their actions, they had to memorize seven numbers. This ploy keeps the brain's thinking regions too tied up to think much about anything else, and it worked, hypocrisy vanished. People judged their own (selfish) behavior as harshly as they did others', strong evidence that moral hypocrisy requires a high-order cognitive process. When the thinking part of the brain is otherwise engaged, we're left with gut-level reactions, and we intuitively and equally condemn bad behavior by ourselves as well as others.
If our gut knows when we have erred and judges our transgressions harshly, moral hypocrisy might not be as inevitable as if it were the child of emotions and instincts, which are tougher to change than thinking. "Since it's a cognitive process, we have volitional control over it," argues DeSteno.

单选题 According to the Enlightenment philosophers, moral judgment is driven by

单选题 In the study, DeSteno and Valdesolo found that

单选题 In the fourth and fifth paragraphs, the expression "gut-level" most probably means

单选题 The memorization of the seven numbers was used in the test to

单选题 The study of DeSteno and other researchers shows that