No evidence for hedonic shifts to bring about more moral hypocrisy: A comment on Lindenberg et al. (2018)

Abstract

Lindenberg et al. report experimental evidence for the effect of hedonic shifts on subjects’ propensity to engage in moral hypocrisy. Hedonic shifts are changes in individuals’ cognitive states that can be triggered by cues in these individuals’ environments such as ambient smells. Individuals in a hedonic cognitive state aim at doing what makes them feel good. Hence, the authors hypothesize that (1) individuals who are in a bad mood and are put in a hedonic cognitive state will more often take a moral stance and (2) when asked to act morally refuse to do so, (3) especially when the costs for acting morally are high, and (4) even if the moral issue upon which they are asked to act is unrelated to the issue pertaining to the moral stance they took. The authors test these four hypotheses in two laboratory experiments and conclude that their results support these hypotheses. In this comment, I highlight design, measurement, and data analysis issues arising with the two studies that challenge this conclusion. Throughout my comment, I give some indications as to how a laboratory experiment testing these four hypotheses could be designed and conducted.