Suckers and Saints: How We Rationalize Being Wimpy

Think about this workplace scenario: You're a skilled professional, well regarded in your organization. One day your boss swings by your desk and asks if you'd mind putting aside your work for a couple hours. He'd like you to help the clerical staff collate some documents. It's an unorthodox request, and not a job you'd enjoy doing. You pause, but you're a team player, so sure.

A couple of weeks pass. You're working at your desk and you overhear your boss talking to a co-worker sitting nearby. Would she mind pitching in on an unpleasant but necessary office task for a while? With a snort, your colleague replies: "Sorry, boss. Not in my job description." End of discussion.

How do you feel at that moment?

Unless you're a Zen master, you probably feel like a schmuck. What were you thinking? Why didn't you assert yourself? Have you jeopardized your standing in the company, your career or—worst of all—your very belief in who you are?

And what do you do now?

Psychologists are very interested in these questions. Situations like this occur every day, not just in the office, but in relationships, politics and other realms. How do we move forward when we have disappointed ourselves by our weakness, failed to stand up for what we believe? How do we shore up our self-esteem when we have failed to act as free thinkers?

Stanford University psychologists Alexander Jordan and Benoit Monin have a theory about this social dynamic, which they label the "sucker to saint" phenomenon. People can't stand the idea of being a fool; it's cognitively intolerable. So they mentally "reframe" the situation to make their behavior not only acceptable but superior: They moralize their spinelessness, transforming it into altruism, community spirit—saintliness. They become "holier than thou."

That's the theory anyway. To test it, the psychologists simulated a workplace scenario similar to the one described above. They had volunteers participate in a sham experiment, and at one point they asked some of them to help out with a monotonous task. It wasn't collating, but just as mindless and dull. Then the psychologists continued the charade by publicly asking another volunteer to do the same dubious job. This volunteer was in reality part of the psychologists' team, and he played the role of the workplace "rebel" by begging off the menial job. Importantly, there were no consequences for not being a team player.

Afterward, the volunteers completed an elaborate set of tests and ratings—including a morality scale—for both themselves and their defiant colleague. The results were striking: those volunteers who had done the boring task and then witnessed the act of rebellion (and only those volunteers) reacted by dramatically boosting their own moral standing. What's more, they came to view the "rebel" not as honorable or assertive but as lacking in moral fiber, a sinner.

What's going on here? Jordan and Monin believe that self-concept has two distinct dimensions: One has to do with things like competence and self-reliance and social agility, while the other is all about warmth and altruism and communitarian values. Complying with an inappropriate request (in the experiment and in life) does indeed threaten one's sense of competency, but it opens another option: thinking of the same behavior as a selfless and moral act not only takes away the threat, it exalts the self as an exemplar of community.

The psychologists wanted to double-check their findings, to make sure the sainthood effect was truly linked to feelings of inadequacy. So they ran the same experiment again, but this time they gave some of the volunteers the chance to bolster their self-esteem beforehand. They did this by having them write a short essay about one of their most admirable traits: sense of humor, creativity, heroism, whatever made them most proud. Then they ran the experiment just as before, and found just what they expected: as reported in the August issue of the journal Psychological Science, the opportunity for self-affirmation completely wiped out the "sucker-to-saint" effect; they witnessed the colleague's rebellion without needing to resort to self-glorification. Put another way, claiming the moral high ground is driven by a basic insecurity.

Herbert writes the We're Only Human ... blog at www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman