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This is a blog on why we believe and do what we do, why we pretend otherwise, how we might do better, and what our descendants might do, if they don't all die.
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From a recent Psychological Science:
In Experiment 1, our confederate cheated ostentatiously by finishing a task impossibly quickly and leaving the room with the maximum reward. In line with social-norms theory, participants' level of unethical behavior increased when the confederate was an in-group member, but decreased when the confederate was an out-group member.
So folks will cheat less when they believe outsiders cheat more. When can this justify preaching that other nations, religions, races, genders, etc. are evil or immoral?
Haters Cheat Less
Doug S.,
my knee-jerk reaction was also "when the enemy is fictional", but I wondered if this might not be sufficient: Preaching even non-existent enemies as being immoral may cause intolerance towards unrelated attributes which were given to this fictional enemy (perhaps to make the lies more convincing).
E.g. "Blubworbs are evil. They steal, murder, rape and have blue eyes." -> "Let's hate people with blue eyes."
conchis point A: "Do you (Robin) have any such behaviors in mind as potential applications?"
This community identifies its enemy as using inappropriate mental shortcuts: the irrational, the comforting fiction, the recursive buck. "They," the soto, are trying to cognitively cheat. To avoid being like Them, "We," the uchi, must be constantly aware of our biases and tendency to use cognitive cheats, with an ironic sense that this cognitive cheating does not really help one win.
Or you could see this as failing: because cognitive cheating is something They do, We must be the ones who are successfully thinking past our biases.