The Problem Was Never Being Right

The Problem Was Never Being Right

Believing your values are right is not the problem. The problem is when that belief buys you a higher place in the room.

My friend Ajené sent me a research paper last week with four words attached: Just sharing. Saddens me.

I should say plainly that my brain is not wired to absorb this kind of information the way it was intended. I read the methods section twice and understood it the second time about as well as the first. It took me a good while to sift through, and what I came away with is a surface reading at best.

But the surface was enough to stop me.

Five studies. Over a thousand people. The same finding every time.

When a group believes itself morally superior to another group, it begins to perceive the people in that other group as less than fully human. And that perception predicts aggression.

Hmmmmm.

It is not a study about bad actors

Here is what makes it land so hard.

This is not research about extremists, or ideologues, or people with something wrong with them. The researchers ran it on American conservatives and liberals and got the effect on both sides, independent of political orientation. They ran it in China on people who supported and opposed euthanasia. And then — this is the part I keep returning to — they ran it on groups that did not exist.

They gave people a meaningless picture test and told them they had a cognitive style called “Dusek” or “Tausig.” Invented words. Assigned at random, minutes earlier, on the basis of nothing at all. Then they told some of them their invented group was the more virtuous one.

It still happened. People began rating the other invented group as less human. And it predicted aggression toward them.

So this is not about history, or grievance, or the genuine wrongs that real groups have done to one another. Those make it worse, certainly. But the mechanism runs without them. All it needs is a sense that we are the good ones.

It is about ordinary people holding ordinary convictions about what is right.

Where the hope is hiding

I almost stopped reading there. Then I got to the fifth study, and that is where something turned.

The researchers had been tracking two things that usually travel together: the sense that your group is morally superior, and the sense that your group therefore stands higher. In the fifth study they pulled those apart and manipulated them separately.

Neither one alone produced dehumanization.

Not moral superiority on its own. Not a sense of higher standing on its own. Only the two together did it.

Hmmmmm.

Sit with that, because it changes the assignment entirely. Believing your values are right is not the problem. You are allowed to think some things are better than other things. You are allowed to have convictions, and the contemplative traditions have never asked anyone to give them up.

The problem comes when that belief converts into a sense of standing above. About being better than.

That middle step is where the damage enters. It is also the step nobody notices themselves taking.

And the researchers found something practical: when they emphasized equal standing between the groups, the whole effect weakened — even among people whose sense of moral superiority was running high. The work is not to hold our convictions more loosely. It is to stop letting them purchase us a higher place in the room.

Now the uncomfortable part

I have been sitting with this for several days, and here is where it finally caught me.

I have a wall of certificates that say I am self-aware. Master Certified Coach. Certified spiritual director. Narrative Enneagram teacher. I had never once thought to put that wall next to a study about moral superiority, and I am not enjoying the view now that I have.

Because inner work is a credential. And a credential confers standing.

Early in my coaching, before I understood the depth of what it actually means to be a coach, I watched someone else trying to do it. And I thought: that person should not be a coach.

I was looking at the outside of them from the outside of me. I had no idea what was happening in that room, or in them, or what they were carrying into it.

I see it differently now. Though I want to be honest about why. What changed me was going further into the ICF mentor coach work — more training, more assessment, another credential. So the thing that corrected my judgment was the same kind of thing that produced it in the first place. I am not sure what to do with that. I am suspicious of any version of this story where I come out clean.

There is a sentence I have heard in good rooms full of serious people, and I have said it myself more than once. They’re just not very self-aware.

Look at what that sentence does. It is a moral claim — awareness is a virtue in our world, maybe the central one. And it is a status claim in the same breath: I have the thing, they lack it, and that places us. Moral superiority plus perceived standing. Exactly the combination the fifth study isolated, delivered in a warm tone of voice.

We have a particularly refined version, too, because ours comes with humility built into the vocabulary. We can say bless them, they’re doing their best with the awareness they have and mean something quite unkind by it. The language of formation is unusually good at carrying contempt without leaving fingerprints.

I teach the Enneagram, which means I help people discover that there are nine distinct ways of being better than everyone else, and that theirs has a number. I say that as a joke. I am about forty percent sure it is one.

Why the tradition built the fences it did

This is where the old practices stop looking quaint to me.

The desert fathers and mothers had an almost absolute prohibition on judging another monk — not as etiquette, but as something closer to a safety rule. There are stories about a brother caught in open sin and the elders refusing to say a word against him. That always struck me as excessive. I am less sure now.

Consider the examen. It is turned inward, always, on yourself. There is no version of the practice where you examine the day’s conduct of other people. That is not an accident of design. It is a discipline built by people who had watched what happens when a sincere person starts keeping accounts on somebody else’s behavior, and who built the instrument so it could only point one direction.

The traditions were not naïve about human goodness. They were worried about exactly this — and worried enough to build fences that look, from the outside, like they go much too far.

Catching The Conversation Workbook

What I think we actually do

I do not think the answer is to stop having convictions. I hold mine. Some things are better than other things and I am not going to pretend otherwise at seventy-four.

What I think we do is watch for the conversion.

Notice the moment a conviction turns into a position. There is a specific feeling to it, and once you know the feeling you can catch it: a small lift, a settling, a sense of having been placed correctly in relation to someone. It is pleasant. That is what makes it so hard to see. It arrives disguised as clarity.

And then do the thing the fifth study says actually works, which is harder than it sounds. Put yourself back on level ground with the person you have just placed below you. Not by pretending you agree with them. By remembering that being right about a thing does not raise you one inch above anybody.

Ajené wrote that this saddens him, and it does. But I came away with something else as well, which I did not expect from a psychology paper.

The invitation is not to be less certain.

It is to stop standing on it.

Peace and every good.

About Jim & Lynette Vaive

Jim and Lynette Vaive are the co-founders of spirit of EQ and co-authors of The Mystical Seeker. They are Master Certified Coaches, certified Narrative Enneagram teachers, and Certified Spiritual Directors. Together they hold credentials in Spiritual Emotional Intelligence (SEQ) — a framework rooted in Lynette’s Doctor of Ministry research — and serve individuals, small groups, and organizations across faith traditions. Learn more at spiritofeq.com.

Source

Zhang et al. (2026). When virtues are weaponized: Moral superiority aggravates outgroup dehumanization. Political Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1111/pops.70140