Holier than Thou
May 11th, 2009 • Posted in: What They're Saying“The message in this work is not that you should rid yourself of moral indignation; sometimes that’s appropriate. But the point is that many types of behavior are driven far more by the situation than by the force of personality. What someone else did in that situation is a very strong warning about what you yourself would do.”
– David Dunning, a social psychologist at New York’s Cornell University, talking to the New York Times in an article examining the gap between how people think they will behave and how they actually behave. Noting that people often consider themselves more virtuous than their peers, the article notes that much of the existing research has found that people “overestimate their willingness to do what’s morally right, whether to give to charity, vote or cooperate with a stranger. In the end, their less generous predictions about peers’ behavior tend to be dead-on accurate — for themselves as well as others in the study.”
Source: New York Times, May 4.
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