The social psychology of topics like deception, cognitive dissonance (where attitudes and behavior conflict), person perception, and relationship quality all relate to hypocrisy. In fact, University of Southern California Professor Jesse Graham and colleagues (2015), citing earlier work, note that “that the entire field of social psychology could be called the science of moral hypocrisy” (p. 158). That’s a pretty strong statement, but the team convincingly provides evidence to can back it up.
The focus of the Graham et al. analysis is moral hypocrisy. Either consciously or not, people deceptively claim to adhere to a set of principles, but do not act (or even necessarily think) in ways consistent with those principles. They call moral hypocrisy “The Construct with a Thousand Faces”—in other words, it comes in many forms. Their definition, to be precise, is to break from your own moral standard, whether you state it publicly or not.
Much of the research, the USC team believes, can fit into three categories—moral duplicity; moral double standards; and moral weakness.
