Behavioral science · mechanism
Moral incongruence
Joshua Grubbs, 2017
Grubbs's research turned up a counterintuitive pattern: the distress people report over a behavior often tracks not how often they do it but how badly it violates who they believe they are. Two people can act identically and suffer differently, because the suffering is generated by the gap between conduct and moral identity — the self-violation, not the frequency.
Working definition
The felt self-violation, not the frequency, that drives reported dysregulation; the gap between conduct and avowed values.
Where Vela uses this
Moral incongruence is precise and useful for the sex, religion, and shame axes, where it separates a behavior's actual footprint from the moral self-judgment laid over it — a distinction Vela needs to read testimony without either dismissing the distress or endorsing the judgment that drives it. It pairs with the shame/guilt distinction and therapeutic culture. Vela uses it descriptively, holding the reader's felt distress as real without ratifying its source.
Origin & lineage
Grubbs et al. (2017) on perceived pornography 'addiction' → the moral-incongruence model of behavior-related distress → extending into research on religiosity and self-reported compulsion.
Where it shows up in Vela
Related concepts
- The shame / guilt distinction
Sits next to — Moral incongruence often resolves into self-directed shame.
- Therapeutic culture
Reads against — One pathologizes the gap; the other reframes it as discourse.
Scholars
Honest framing
The model is newer and still accumulating evidence, and its scope beyond the cases it was built on is unsettled. Vela cites it for the specific distinction it draws, not as a general theory of moral distress.