Does feeling holier than others make one more or less moral? The effect of the belief in moral self-superiority on moral judgment, action, and sanctioning.

Most people believe that they possess morally good traits more, and morally bad traits less, than others (moral self-superiority). However, little is known about how this moral self-superiority plays out in terms of moral judgments, moral actions, and responses to moral actions of others. Exploring these effects may be consequential because of the influence of people’s self-views on their behavior, the fundamentally comparative nature of these self-views, and the robust and general evidence for moral self-superiority. Moreover, moral choices are ubiquitous in everyday life and almost all large-scale societal challenges have a moral component, from curbing pandemics to fighting poverty. Two competing hypotheses may be derived from the literature on moral behavior. One states that moral self-superiority discourages morally good choices, reduces appreciation for other people’s morally good choices, and enhances disapproval of their morally bad ones. The other states that moral self-superiority facilitates morally good actions and inspires generosity and leniency towards others. In this social psychological project we will pit the two perspectives against each other in a series of experiments and a longitudinal study. We will thus learn whether moral self-superiority ironically undermines people’s morality or amplifies people’s morality, an insight of great relevance in the domains of education, management, mental health, and personal growth.