Why 'Saints' Are at Times Bad, and 'Sinners' Good

Saints – and we use this term to describe people of high moral value, who generally practice what they preach – are oftentimes considered to be incorruptible. But they too can do things that raise questions, such as adultery, extortion, deceit, and so on, and offend even the most loose-moralled individuals. Conversely, people who are generally considered to be sinners surprise everybody else at times, by performing actions so selfless and kind, that no one knows who the bad guys and the good guys are anymore. Researchers conducted a new study in the lab, designed to answer this question.

However, they warn that the conclusions they made public are not the result of measuring moral acts in an opened environment, or in real-life, and that they come after assessing participants' reactions in the lab. They also add that estimating the true value of a moral act in the real world is very complicated.

In their work, the scientists set off from the existing knowledge that people generally did good because that, in turn, made them also feel good about themselves, their lives, and the people they met. It would then stand to reason that they will continue to do good, as this is what makes them experience positive feelings and other outcomes as well. But a study published two years ago in the Journal of Applied Psychology shows that people who are generally good may do bad things as a means to a noble purpose, but that they cannot achieve through “good” actions.

When this happens, and they cross over to the “dark side,” these individuals also tend to loosen their own judgment on themselves, and to find all sorts of justifications for their actions, after which they continue to do them again and again, while at the same time keeping up their ethic and moral facade. And this is most obvious with politicians, whose power and influence may give the feeling of intangibility. While, in the public eye, they behave morally, in their private life, they are adulterers.

The same holds true, for example, for a large number of US southern states, which are mostly conservative, Christian and highly religious, and which are easily offended if a skirt that is too short appears on TV. At the same time, these states are the largest purchasers of child-abuse explicit content from the Internet, and make up the largest number of hits on adult websites.

“We can't invest all of our time and effort, and all of our money into doing good things. We wouldn't be able to function. So we have to make these trade-offs between being moral and being immoral,” Rumen Iliev, a researcher at the Northwestern university, who was involved with the new study, explains for LiveScience. The paper appears in the April issue of the journal Psychological Science.

“I think when one starts observing everyday behavior one can start seeing patterns where doing something good will actually later result in less effort in continuing some kind of moral behavior,” he concludes.