American undergraduates applied blatant double standards favoring their own nation’s aggressive actions

Evidence

The intensity of these feelings, on the American side at least, was driven home in a study of the double standards found among a group of California undergraduates (Oskamp, 1965). These students thought it all right that the United States had established rocket bases close to the borders of Russia, that America had carried out blockades, that it had intervened in civil wars in Third World countries, and so on. The same actions by the Soviet Union, however, were roundly condemned. — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 1575

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to moral psychology work on motivated reasoning and in-group bias; also to the reader’s wider interest in group loyalty overriding consistency.