Witness to hypocrisy: Reacting to ingroup hypocrites in the presence of others

How is one's reaction to a fellow ingroup member's normative hypocrisy affected by the presence of a third party observer who is an ingroup member or an outgroup member? To investigate this question we experimentally manipulated the group membership and reaction of a third party to ingroup hypocrisy in a 2 × 2 design (N = 78) and measured participants' personal endorsement of pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors that were normative of the ingroup. As predicted from a social identity analysis of the function of norms and prototypes in social influence processes, personal endorsement of pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors was strongest when an outgroup member remarked negatively on the hypocrisy, and weakest when an outgroup member did not appear to notice the hypocrisy.