Holier than me? Threatening Social Comparison in the Moral Domain

By Benoît Monin. 2007

209 citations recorded by the source corpus.

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e23d665b41da3de3fafe286ae8ea16bb5fc84206

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Citations in the corpus

Moral Elevation and Moral Beauty: A Review of the Empirical Literature (2016, background): “It is possible that comparing oneself with a moral exemplar can become a threat to the self (Monin, 2007; Monin, Sawyer, & Marquez, 2008) and lead to feelings of moral inferiority, moral confusion about the rightness of one’s own behavior, or anticipated moral reproach (see in detail Monin, 2007).”
The dynamic moral self: A social psychological perspective. (2009, background): “The reflexive defense of one’s fragile moral self-regard may, then, sometimes block people from learning from and being inspired by the behavior of morally exemplary peers (Monin, 2007).”
Approach, Ability, Aftermath: A Psychological Process Framework of Unethical Behavior at Work (2015, background): “Since it is so important to most people to think of themselves as highly ethical (Monin, 2007; Tyson, 1990), unethical behavior needs to be coded into memory as consistent with that selfimage.”
Exploring the When and Why of Schadenfreude (2009, unknown): “Such symmetry and balance, associated with moralizing people especially (Monin, 2007), should be inherently pleasant (Feather, 2006; Heider, 1958); it is ‘poetic justice’.”
Moral Self-Licensing: When Being Good Frees Us to Be Bad (2010, background): “We have focused on licensing in the moral domain because the motivation to feel and appear moral is widely shared (Aquino & Reed, 2002; Monin, 2007), but licensing effects can be observed in a wide variety of other domains that have personal value for individuals.”
Elevation Puts Moral Values Into Action (2012, background): “Monin (2007) proposes that observing exceptional moral behavior may trigger an upward social comparison, resulting in the conclusion that the perceiver’s own morality may be lacking.”
Coordinate to cooperate or compete: Abstract goals and joint intentions in social interaction (2016, background): “by personal image or other selfish motivations to ignore the inconsistency (Monin, 2007; Monin, Sawyer, & Marquez, 2008).”
Ethically adrift: How others pull our moral compass from true North, and how we can fix it (2013, background): “Envy, which arises frequently among workers and managers (Duffy & Shaw, 2000; Vecchio, 2005), can be accompanied by feelings of inferiority and resentment (Monin, 2007), or a sense of injustice due to one‟s disadvantageous position,”
The primacy of morality in impression development: Theory, research, and future directions (2021, background): “Indeed, downward social comparison (Suls & Wheeler, 2013; Wills, 1981) with an immoral outgroup is likely to reduce the sense of threat to the ingroup and to personal moral identity (Minson & Monin, 2012; Monin, 2007) and enhance the perception of moral superiority (Epley & Dunning, 2000).”
Behavioral Ethics: Toward a Deeper Understanding of Moral Judgment and Dishonesty (2012, methodology): “However, this means behaving in a way that feels unethical in a prejudiceconscious society; as a result, participants do not express this preference unless they had been established their non-racist self-image by the first choice –what Monin and Miller labeled a moral credential. Across various stud”
History of Social Psychology: Insights, Challenges, and Contributions to Theory and Application (2010, background): “Selective comparison also allows one to defend one’s sense of fairness and morality in the face of dubiously moral or fair behavior, by comparing oneself to others whose behavior in the pertinent domain is equally or even more suspect (Bandura, 1999, Monin, 2007).”
Moral hypocrisy, moral inconsistency, and the struggle for moral integrity. (2012, background): “…elicited (Fein, Hilton, & Miller, 1990), and moral behavior is spontaneously chalked up to situational demands instead or real dispositions (Ybarra, 2002), so any moral behavior exposes one to the charge of moral hypocrisy, especially if it makes others feel less morally adequate (Monin, 2007).”
Vegetarianism. A blossoming field of study. (2012, unknown): “Monin & Minson, 2007 (cited in Monin, 2007) found that omnivores viewed vegetarians as good people, as reflected by higher ratings on Osgood, Suci, and Tannenbaum’s (1957) evaluation dimension, but they diffused potential threat by calling them weak, as reflected by lower score’s on Osgood et al.’s…”
Children Who Choose Not to Eat Meat: A Study of Early Moral Decision-making (2009, background): “In fact, Monin (2007) found that vegetarian adults tended to be more tolerant of meat eating than non-vegetarians predicted.”
Strategies for cooperation in biological markets, especially for humans (2013, background): “Monin (2007) suggests that this “do-gooder derogation” can be done by implying that another's morality reflects well-intentioned naivety or weakness rather than moral strength, pointing out obvious or imagined incentives a person may have been following for being generous, or implying real or…”
“Doing well by doing good”? Ambivalent moral framing in organizations (2011, background): “Monin and Norton (2003) found that non-vegetarians rated vegetarians, who moralize their dietary choices, as higher on the warmth dimension, but lower on competence, than fellow non-vegetarians. Aaker, Vohs, and Mogilner (2010) found that non-profit companies were rated as warmer but less competent ”