Although evil characters in movies and television series tend to be unquestionably evil and selfish, it has long been known that even human beings who have committed real atrocities are capable of retaining a deep-rooted sense of ethics. their daily lives and believe that what they do is not wrong. In a sense, it seems as if self-image and whether or not you break norms are relatively independent of each other, so that even People who are most likely to betray their principles are able to maintain a kind view of themselves
How can this happen? Researchers like Dan Ariely maintain that Human beings have an incredible capacity to deceive ourselves or, rather, to let only the part of information that interests us pass through to our “rational” side. Thus, we would not have to dedicate any effort to constructing a biased story about why we have acted unethically: this story would be constructed automatically, based on a totally interested filtering of data and from which our self-image will come out well.
Recently, research by psychologists Maryam Kouchaki and Francesca Gino (from Northwestern University and Harvard University, respectively) has provided evidence of a similar filtering that affects memory. According to their results, We have a harder time remembering unethical actions than other types of events That is, we experience what they call “unethical amnesia”, or amnesia of the immoral and that it is possible that this phenomenon exists for our good.
The reason for unethical amnesia is based, hypothetically, on the state of discomfort generated by knowing that one has acted unethically and violating the vital principles that one tries to follow.
The appearance of this uncomfortable tension, which would generate a type of dissonance between “what should be” and “what is” would activate some defense and coping mechanisms designed to make the discomfort disappear, and one of them would be the tendency to show ourselves especially forgetful about events that compromise our sense of ethics.
The experiments
In one of the tests carried out by Kouchaki and Gino, 279 students had to perform a simple exercise in which they had to try to guess the number that came up when throwing a six-sided die over twenty throws. Every time they guessed the number, they would receive a small amount of money as a prize.
Some of these participants were forced to say beforehand the number they thought should be drawn, while others could simply tell whether their forecast had been fulfilled or not, so it was very easy for them to lie and take a sum of money that according to the established rules did not correspond to them.
After going through this short test, all participants had to complete a questionnaire that included questions about feelings of moral dissonance and self-concept designed to record the extent to which they felt good about themselves, whether they felt somewhat ashamed, etc. . As predicted, generally people who belonged to the group of participants who had been given the opportunity to lie tended to reflect a greater sense of discomfort in their questionnaire responses
Days later…
And this is where the forgetfulness of unethical actions appears. Two days after taking the dice test and completing the questionnaire, the people in the group of participants who had been allowed to cheat showed more difficulty remembering the details of the experiment
Their memories of the task of throwing the dice were less intense, less clear and with fewer elements than those of the rest of the volunteers. Possibly, something in these people’s brains had been acting to get rid of information about what happened relatively quickly.
Returning to the initial situation
In addition to obtaining evidence about this curious mechanism of strategic forgetting of uncomfortable information, the two researchers also reached another conclusion: people in the group that had been allowed to cheat felt good about themselves again very quickly
In fact, two days after playing with the dice, their scores on the self-concept and moral dissonance questionnaire were not different from those of the rest of the participants.
Is amnesia of immorality useful?
Given that in our daily lives it is relatively easy for us to break certain moral rules several times, no matter how small, it may be that unethical amnesia keeps us safe from anxiety crises produced by the fact of realizing over and over again that we are not capable of meeting certain ideal objectives. In this sense, Making it more difficult to recall negative memories about one’s ethics may be a useful and adaptive mechanism
However, the existence of this phenomenon would entail certain drawbacks, taking into account that it can lead us to have very few reasons to act according to our ethical scale and break all the rules opportunistically.
Amnesia towards what is to come
In fact, in another part of the previous research, Kouchaki and Gino had the dice-rolling test followed by one in which the participants had to solve word puzzles, earning money with each correct answer. Participants in the group that had been allowed to cheat in the dice game were significantly more likely to cheat in this second test as well.
This could be a sign that immoral amnesia would not only have consequences for what just happened, but could open a window of opportunity for us to act dishonestly again
There may be certain mental mechanisms that help us maintain a good opinion of ourselves, but they could also make it easier for us to enter a spiral of transgression of ethics.
