After a month of anguished indecision, Joseph Darby, a U.S. military policeman stationed at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, sent Army authorities photographs of his colleagues torturing prisoners. For his act of heroism, he received so many death threats that he had to live in protective military custody at an undisclosed location.
Darby is no exception, shows a recent research article. “We don’t necessarily like people who do the right thing,” says Benoît Monin, an associate professor of organizational behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the report’s lead author. “They call into question our own lack of moral entrepreneurship.”
In one of his studies, for example, undergraduate participants who completed a racist task disliked a “moral rebel”—a person who refused to complete the task on moral grounds— more than a person who, like them, had gone along with the study. Yet participants who merely observed the experiment, but were not asked to complete it, liked the rebel more. “Observers will rate the rebel as a more moral person, but as soon as you set foot into the situation, you like the moral rebel less,” Monin explains. A subsequent study showed that these ireful participants expected the moral rebel to reject them for their moral lassitude. In other words, they viewed the rebels not as righteous, but as self-righteous.
As a result, “people should expect a backlash when taking moral stances,” concludes Monin. “That’s true of individuals, as well as of organizations. If one organization chooses to be more ethical, other organizations may take it as an implicit reproach, as an accusation.”
And so, “when you take a moral action, think twice about sharing it with others,” Monin recommends. “It’s like that Bible passage: ‘[When you give to the poor] do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing.’” He also suggests not framing ethical steps in ethical terms. “People want to do good, but it’s not cool to say so,” he says. Rather, he and other researchers find that couching scruples as self-interest can make the high road more appealing. (See, for example, “From the Bottom Line of Our Hearts” in the summer 2007 issue of the Stanford Social Innovation Review.)
Finally, “if you want to take a moral stance, you may want to reveal that you aren’t perfect yourself, so that you don’t sound like you’re putting yourself on a pedestal,” says Monin. “Then reveal the steps you took to come to your conclusion.”
Read more stories by Alana Conner.