How to Tell If You Are a Hypocrite
It’s bad enough to be downright wrong about something. It’s even worse when you persist in trying to convince everyone that you’re right. Doing this in the face of blatant opposition is not a good look, and at worst it can give the impression that you are trying your best to act like a brazen hypocrite.
Despite the fact that everyone around you criticizes your approach, deep down you can still believe that your desire for recognition is justified. Take, for example, a situation currently unfolding in the typically humble world of Iowa politics: Democratic Congresswoman Rita Hart recently lost her re-election bid by a total of six votes . With less than razor-sharp margin going to win Republican challenger Mariannett Miller-Mix, Hart wants a recount. She actually wants a second count. In particular, she claims that “22 ballots were mistakenly excluded and others were not verified during the recount” of the original competition, the Associated Press reported .
With Donald Trump constantly challenging the 2020 presidential election results, some online critics have called Hart a hypocrite. By not admitting defeat, isn’t she challenging her party’s consistent efforts to label Trump’s election fraud claims as false? (It doesn’t matter if they’re wrong, as countless failed lawsuits have shown .) Untouched by the critics, Hart will likely push for another recount without considering whether the keyboardists are right. (Of course, it is worth noting the difference between a candidate requiring all the votes to be counted and a candidate requiring only certain votes to be counted.)
But there are ways to find out if you’re a hypocrite – and luckily for most of us, you didn’t have to be publicly shy to figure it out.
You have a superiority complex
As Dean Burnett wrote in The Guardian in 2016 , most people are very flattering about themselves, which is not so true about other people.
He explained that this is a psychological question related to the brain’s self-image:
The brain is riddled with cognitive distortions and memory distortions that aim to make us feel good, decent, and capable regardless of reality. The problem is that our judgments about other people are much more “realistic” .
This is an overly academic way of saying that you can be a hypocrite if you think some things don’t apply to you but still apply to others. Whether it is because you think people are not as smart as you, or because they lack qualifications or experience, you might appear to be disingenuous anyway. One way to reduce the likelihood of this happening is to work to calm your ego , which is generally a beneficial practice for many people.
You care more about looks than altruism.
If you do nice things mainly to satisfy your personal need to appear kind and altruistic to other people, then congratulations — you might be a hypocrite. As psychologist Susan Krauss Whitbourne wrote in Psychology Today four years ago , the need to maintain one’s image through altruistic action has long been part of the hypocrite’s arsenal.
In Whitbourne’s words:
Hypocrites are most often motivated by a desire to look good, rather than an inner desire to achieve personal goals.
You are generally inconsistent in life.
You can preach certain values, but you don’t constantly live up to them. Inconsistency in a broad, dominant sense is the hallmark of hypocrisy. Are you known to be stumped for various social left wing reasons, but love to be nervous about the government stealing your money every time you file your tax return?
As researchers from the European Journal of Psychology wrote in 2015, the concept of inconsistency is defined as follows:
Confession of the moral requirement of others, which a person cannot comply with himself; cases where someone says or implies something in public and behaves differently in private; examples where stated or implicit beliefs are NOT consistent with their behavior.
Of course, things are inconsistent sometimes, but when it comes to your character’s defining rule, rather than the rare exception, you can be a hypocrite.