My collaborators and I show in our experiments that how confident people are of their own worth plays a large role in whether they will engage in morally problematic behavior, how they estimate the moral behavior of other people in their community, whether they tolerate the moral exemplarity of others, and even whether they condemn the behavior of others as immoral.

Moral psychology provides a compelling analysis of how individuals determine right from wrong, either when deciding what ought to be done in hypothetical dilemmas, or when reacting to shocking moral violations (see Monin, Pizarro, & Beer, 2007). I argue that these findings can be complemented by considering the role of self-image in everyday morality. An individual who feels that she has already proven that she is a good person, for example, feels less pressure to do the right thing (moral credentials, Monin & Miller, 2001). The motivation to protect a positive self-image and avoid moral suspicion can have dramatic consequences, as when individuals deny exposure to a disease for fear that it would imply that they engaged in unsafe sex (Young, Nussbaum, & Monin, 2007).

I demonstrate the role of protecting the self by showing how other people's choices can be threatening. For example, the morally admirable behavior of others can paradoxically be resented if it threatens observers' own sense of moral adequacy (Monin, 2007): We may not appreciate moral behavior when it implies that we should have done a little more, and this may lead to resentment against moral rebels (Monin, Sawyer, & Marquez, 2008) and to do-gooder derogation (e.g., of vegetarians). On the other hand, moralization can serve to protect against non-moral threats to the self: When someone else's choice make us feel stupid about our own, we can justify it by deciding that we were just being more moral (Jordan & Monin, 2008 -- and see the story in Newsweek).

Norms against prejudice provide an interesting window into the workings of everyday morality. More than engaging in traditional sins, many contemporary Americans worry about doing something that would imply sexist or racist attitudes. The moral nature of this threat is revealed both by the guilt and shame reported by individuals who fear that they have violated their own egalitarian values, and by the opprobrium that befalls those suspected of prejudice. The threat of the moral stigma attached to prejudice can hinder effective communication in academic settings, for example when advisers sugarcoat feedback to minority students to avoid feeling racist (Crosby & Monin, 2007).

In this context, how do individuals ever gain the confidence to say what's really on their mind? One source of such confidence is their track record as a good egalitarian individuals: For example, experiments show that individuals who have had the opportunity to recruit a woman in one setting (establishing their moral credentials) are more likely to say that another job would be better suited for a man (Monin & Miller, 2001). When it comes to identifying prejudice in others, members of majority groups appear surprisingly eager to take cues from members of targeted groups. Eye-tracking technology makes it possible to record where individuals are looking while witnessing a potentially racist comment, and reveals that their attention is redirected towards a minority bystander if he can hear the comment too (Crosby, Monin, & Richardson, 2007 -- and see the story in Time Magazine).

When individuals act in ways that violate their principles under what they perceive to be minimal pressure, they feel quite uncomfortable. One way to deal with this discomfort, which has been studied extensively over the last fifty years under the name of cognitive dissonance (Festinger, 1957), is to change those principles in the direction of one's problematic behavior. But what happens when an important other engages in behavior that violates our common principles or attitudes? We have found (Norton, Monin, Cooper, & Hogg, 2003) that when we observe a fellow ingroup member behave against her attitudes, if the group is important enough, we end up changing our own attitude to accommodate her behavior and alleviate this vicarious dissonance. For example, students who heard a fellow student agree to make a speech in favor of raising tuition, something they both initially opposed, increased their support for the tuition hike if they identified strongly with their university.

One way morality affects our behavior is through the enormous pressure of social norms. Yet what's fascinating is that individuals don't always get these norms right. They exhibit systematic biases in the way they perceive social norms, and more generally when they try to predict what others are thinking or doing, or even what others expect of them. Pluralistic ignorance (Miller, Monin & Prentice, 2000) refers to cases where the majority's attitude is misperceived due to publicly misrepresented attitudes. For example, it is possible for every member of a society to resent stringent moral rules of conduct, but for the rules to continue being followed by all because each person believes he or she is the only one with misgivings, and thus fears expressing them. Analyzing the mechanics and biases involved in consensus estimation and norm inference is central to understanding what compels people to act morally, and how they cope with acting immorally. In a field study of a campus water shortage (Monin & Norton, 2003), for example, we found that people who acted selfishly and showered despite a ban justified their behavior by overestimating the number of peers who also showered, while individuals who didn't shower felt more special about it by underestimating the number of peers displaying a similar restraint.

"Haven't we met before?" This old pick-up line may actually be the subtlest compliment you'll ever hear. It turns out that when we find people attractive, we are actually more likely to think we have met them before, even if it truly is the first time we are seeing them (Monin, 2003). That is in part due to the fact that attractive people have prototypical faces, and that prototypes feel implicitly more familiar than less typical exemplars of a category. But we have shown that something else is also at work - the warm glow heuristic, a mental shortcut that can help us when we're at a loss as to whether we've met someone before. In times of uncertainty such as this, we rely on our affective reaction to the person. This may often be an effective strategy, but it can lead to the systematic false recognition of attractive stimuli (see the story in Psychology Today).