Behave Yourself: Moral Behavior and Conformity

As kids we were often nudged by our parents to be conventional: “look at your behavior- why don’t you behave like everyone else?” is a sentence I’ve been hearing from mum too often as a child. When we press someone to act morally we say “be a mensch” employing the Yiddish/German word that simply means “a human being” - not an angle or priest but an ordinary, simple human being. Most of us believe that conformity and morality are linked together, and that considering how others would behave in a certain situation would induce us to act morally. But is it really the case? A laboratory experiment my colleague David Rojo Arjona and I conducted at the University of Leicester casts doubt on this insight. Our experiment involved subjects playing a game with two possible actions: one selfish and immoral, the other less profitable but moral. The game was played in two different setups. In the first one each player was paid solely based on his or her action. In the second one players received an additional small bonus if their action was identical to the one chosen by the majority of the players. Hence, the players in the second setup were induced towards conformity.

Source: flicker

Quite surprisingly the players in the second group acted on average less moral. But, in fact, it is not that surprising. Whether or not conformity would push us towards a more moral behavior depends on how we expect others to behave in a given situation. If we believe that people are basically good by nature, conformity would drive us to act more morally, but if we adopt a gloomier viewpoint of humankind believing that people are selfish and mean by nature, then conformity would induce us to be more selfish and immoral. So maybe a better educational strategy would be to ask our kids to display a behavior that is superior to the convention. Maybe mum should have told me: “look at your behavior – why don’t you behave better than everyone else?” I doubt this would have been helpful. Such a message would imply that others behave improperly, and since all of us have some innate desire to conform it is likely to induce us to act less morally.

If this story about our moral experiment contains a moral, then it must be that conformity and morality don’t necessarily go hand in hand. If we want our kids to behave better we should tell them just that. We can add that as a rule of thumb behaving morally is the best course of action: “look at your behavior – why don’t you behave better? It would to be good for you to do so.”