If you’d drag a stranger for it but excuse your best friend, that’s not loyalty. That’s bias.

Applying a harsher standard to strangers than to people you like is so ordinary that it rarely registers as a choice. Loyalty is a real value, and it is a different thing from deciding the same behavior is acceptable when a friend does it. That second thing is preference wearing loyalty’s clothes. The tell is whether your verdict shifts with the name attached to it.

Take a recent judgment you made about someone and swap the person for a friend. If the verdict flips, it was never about the behavior. Choose which standard you actually want and run it in both directions.