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from the title-field-should-have-the-right-to-more-characters.-on-second-thought,-no-it-doesn't...or-does-it? dept.
Submitted via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd
Many commentators considered President Obama’s reversal on same-sex marriage an act of courage. But this isn’t how the public usually perceives moral mind-changers, according to a team led by Tamar Kreps at the University of Utah. Their findings0 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology suggest that leaders who shift from a moral stance don’t appear brave – they just look like hypocrites.
The researchers conducted 15 studies, of which I’ll focus on one example that illustrates the core approach. Nearly 800 participants recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk read scenarios where a member of the US Congress took a stance on either the death penalty or same-sex marriage. In some cases, their stance was pragmatic, indicated in their statement through phrases like “it’s a matter of not having to invest in the cost of changing government systems”. In other cases the justification for the stance was moral – “it’s a matter of justice.”
Participants rated their initial feelings about the politician and then learned that he or she had since changed their tune, again making a statement based on either pragmatic or moral reasons. For example, a statement might read “It’s still a moral issue for me…I’ve realized, though, that we can never be 100 per cent certain that the convicted party is guilty, and truly defending justice means never taking the risk of killing an innocent victim.” Finally, participants rated the politicians again.
When their initial stance was moral rather than pragmatic, the political leaders suffered costs and gained no benefits after changing their moral mind. Participants rated them as less effective, less worthy of support and more hypocritical, with the intensity of hypocrisy driving the other two negative judgments. Even those participants who agreed with moral mind-changers’ new position saw them as hypocritical, although slightly less so than other participants. At the same time, moral mind changers were seen as no more courageous, effective, or worthy of support, compared to the congress men and women who changed their initial pragmatically grounded position.
0Hypocritical flip-flop, or courageous evolution? When leaders change their moral minds. (http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000103)
(Score: 5, Interesting) by unauthorized on Wednesday August 01 2018, @07:26PM
Revisionist history. The adpocalypse was a response to manufactured moral panic in response over a comedy video from YouTube commedian PewDiePie in which he satirized nazis in such blatantly obvious way that only perpetually butthurt moral crusaders on a quest to find something to be outraged over would find offensive. It was never about the "nazis" because Google actually does censor hate speech, through they use a sane definition so the "white genocide" crowd doesn't get censored since claiming that a white genocide is occurring is not actually a call for violence.
I loathe to side with Google, but they did made it abundantly clear that the policy changes were in response to advertiser pressure, they made no attempt to deceive us into thinking it was some kind of political stance as you seem to be implying.