If you're a fan or keen student of human psychology, you're probably feeling spoiled for choice right now at the number of interesting reactions to a couple of shocking scandals (for a given value of "scandal"). There's the news that Lance Armstrong has received a lifetime ban and been stripped of his Tour de France titles after not contesting accusations of doping, and of course Prince Harry has been photographed naked in Las Vegas and some papers are going ahead and publishing the pictures, despite criticisms.

The stories are mirror images of each other. Both feature high-profile, high-status males being caught with their pants down (literally, in Harry's case) in a very public way. But Lance Armstrong's scandal involves an individual who supposedly earned his incredible success through hard work and determination but is alleged to have broken the rules and cheated to get ahead (he continues to protest his innocence). Prince Harry, on the other hand, is someone who was born into success and can't shake off the idolisation of many members of the public no matter how hard he tries. And he has tried. Both seem to be occupying two ends of the same spectrum.

I don't follow any sport, so was confused by reading the news that "Armstrong is to be stripped of his titles". At first I thought this meant Buzz Aldrin is now officially the first man on the moon, but have since checked the details. Whether you think Armstrong has been unfairly hounded by a vindictive organisation or has cynically avoided facing up to his wrongdoings, that's a matter for you, but I seriously doubt the truth is as binary as these possibilities suggest.

I myself could take steroids or experience blood doping, but this wouldn't automatically sweep me to victory in the Tour de France. It would probably put me into such a hypeorxygenated testosterone-fuelled rage that I wouldn't be allowed to enter France at all. And all the steroids and doping you can handle won't cure you of advanced cancer. To beat that and recover to the point where you repeatedly win an extremely challenging athletic contest is still an achievement, with or without chemical assistance. But, rules are rules. That's sort of the point of sport; if you're not going to follow them, why bother?

Prince Harry, by contrast, has done nothing wrong, insofar as he's not broken any rules. To get naked among willing friends in a private hotel room is not against the law, no matter who you are. You could argue that as a royal and influential figure, he shouldn't do that sort of thing, but taking nude pictures of someone without their consent and selling them to the media is also something you shouldn't do, surely? He's also a young man in the armed forces. From stories I've heard about similar individuals, if this is the worst thing he gets up to when on holiday then we can count ourselves lucky.

Both the Armstrong and Prince Harry stories have so many elements and occupy such diffuse areas of morality and acceptability that people's reactions to them are often more interesting, from a psychological perspective, than the stories themselves.

Many people have been quick to condemn them. This could be because they feel let down and want to lash out. They may feel like those who behave badly deserve to be punished. A sense of justice is seemingly hardwired into humans (and maybe even human-like creatures), so individuals who appear to have achieved success through dubious means or have had it handed to them purely by accident of birth will frustrate our sense of fairness, and any opportunity to address this will be readily accepted.

There's also envy to consider. Celebrities and high-profile figures seem to be exempt from the same rules around privacy and accountability that we extend to most normal people. Ken from the office fiddles his expenses? That's fine, we all do it. MPs do it? It's "heads must roll" time. This is arguably as it should be. People who aspire to positions of authority or trust should be held to higher standards, but this is regularly taken to ridiculous, invasive extremes when it comes to celebrities. The public loves a bit of schadenfreude, which could be seen as a way of saying "How DARE this person be successful when I'm not! They should suffer for this."

The psychological reactions of the public to celebrity scandals and the manipulations of the media have been discussed many times before, but it's still a source of endless fascination for people like me. There are so many examples of psychological phenomena being splashed all over the news feeds and social networks by people oblivious to the fact that they are exhibiting them. For someone in the psychological disciplines it's like running a UV light over a hotel bed (not necessarily Prince Harry's, his privacy has been compromised enough).

Much of this comes from people needing a definitive way to conceptualise such ambiguous matters. The human brain doesn't deal well with ambiguity, that's why visual illusions like the necker cube or classic faces/candlestick are either one or the other interpretation; the brain imposes structure on visually ambiguous images, but if there is more than one valid interpretation then it keeps changing between them. So when faced with uncertain scenarios, people may jump to a conclusion and stick to it before their minds get torn apart by uncertainty, like a robot encountering a logical paradox.

You get to see a lot of attribution bias too. This is where people say other people are at fault for something that, if in the same situation, they would do themselves. We know our own minds, and we maintain a positive view of who we are and what we're capable of. If we don't, then we lose the ability to function normally. But we can't know how other people's minds work, so we tend to assume they are personally at fault, when we would/can blame external factors for when something happens to us. For example someone saying "I've gotten naked and acted like an arse when pissed, but that's because I was hammered and my mates were taking advantage of me. Harry is a prince though, he should know better, he's just a privileged idiot."

My personal favourite is cognitive dissonance, which can often be seen at work on a large scale among media types. It's essentially a way of justifying your actions with the belief that you are right, even when the evidence doesn't support this claim. A perfect example is The Sun publishing the pictures of Prince Harry when nobody else would, then coming up with a variety of bizarre explanations for why this was the right thing to do, other than, "We'll shift more papers with pictures of a naked royal in them."

A lot of people have wondered why The Sun is bothering with the whole "our readers have a right to see them" argument when the pictures are freely available online.

I can offer no real explanation, alternatives or way to stop this sort of thing. It's just interesting from a scientific perspective. For psychologists, it can be like astronomers watching a meteor shower: you don't do anything about it, you just appreciate the spectacle for what it is, and it's all the more fascinating when you understand what's happening.



Witness the deranged ramblings of Dean Burnett's own mind on Twitter: @garwboy