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The bad news about good ethics- MORAL SELF-LICENSING

There is evidence that supports the notion that people are more likely to “misbehave” after they engages in what they perceives as ethical/moral conduct.  The theory, called “moral self-licensing”, predicts that people make note of their good behaviors and tend to act contrary to this soon thereafter.

An experiment in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology reported that people who expressed their support for presidential candidate Barack Obama were more likely to later declare that whites would be better suited than blacks for a hypothetical job vacancy in a police department.  It seems that their support for a back candidate won them “credit as non-racists”, and provided them with a “license to discriminate” in subsequent task.

A similar effect was found in a study measuring people’s propensity toward greed.  Students were asked to shop for items at one of two online stores. Half of the students shopped at a store stocked with mostly “green” products and the remainder shopped at a store that carried “conventional” products.  After spending an allotted $25 on products, the students were presented with various situations designed to measure their honesty and propensity toward greed. 

The students who shopped at the “green” store were more willing to 1) lie about the result of a coin game in order to profit, 2) act greedy by allocating more money to themselves than to a partner and 3) steal more money from an envelope when asked to retrieve their winnings. 

The clearest lesson for all of us is that we should be “on guard” with respect to our own actions.  We should recognize that our own moral acts may make us more likely to feel that we have earned the right (moral license) to act selfishly, discriminatory toward others or immorally.  Self-awareness is the key to avoiding this trap.

Here is the title, abstract citation, and the link to a good article if you’re interested in reading more about this phenomenon:

Moral Self-Licensing: When Being Good Frees Us to Be Bad

Abstract

Past good deeds can liberate individuals to engage in behaviors that are immoral, unethical, or otherwise problematic, behaviors that they would otherwise avoid for fear of feeling or appearing immoral. We review research on this moral self-licensing effect in the domains of political correctness, prosocial behavior, and consumer choice. We also discuss remaining theoretical tensions in the literature: Do good deeds reframe bad deeds (moral credentials) or merely balance them out (moral credits)? When does past behavior liberate and when does it constrain? Is self-licensing primarily for others’ benefit (self-presentational) or is it also a way for people to reassure themselves that they are moral people? Finally, we propose avenues for future research that could begin to address these unanswered questions.

Social and Personality Psychology Compass 4/5 (2010): 344–357

Anna C. Merritt*, Daniel A. Effron, and Benoıˆt Monin Stanford University
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