The Role of Gender and Emotions on Moral Hypocrisy

Recent studies have shown that the emotions of anger and guilt have interesting effects on an individual’s moral hypocrisy. Anger increasing the likelihood that one will be hypocritical and guilt effectively neutralizes any hypocritical tendencies. (Polman & Ruttan, 2012) We were keenly interested to see if we could duplicate these results at Ouachita and were also curious as to whether or not gender plays a role in how hypocritical a person will be. We wanted to know if emotion or gender could negatively impact logical reasoning because if they do, we could keep this in mind while making judgments in the future. We hypothesized that anger would show a significant effect for moral hypocrisy and that guilt would neutralize any tendencies towards moral hypocrisy. We also hypothesized that anger would affect men more than women