Completed egoism and intended altruism boost healthy food choices☆

Consistency Versus Licensing Effects of Past Moral Behavior

“…The data are more ambiguous when it comes to whether participants get to talk about things they have done in the past (actions, presumably concrete) versus things they will do in the future (intentions, presumably abstract). On one hand, and consistent with the other findings in this section, Weibel et al (2014) found that recalling completed actions leads to balancing (donut design), whereas expressing intentions of future actions leads to consistency. On the other hand, Cascio & Plant (2015) found that merely imagining future moral acts can grant one moral credits and license morally questionable behavior, so it seems that expressing intentions can sometimes lead to licensing (see also Brown et al 2011;Clot et al 2013Clot et al , 2014a, perhaps because intentions can also be formulated in concrete terms.…”

“…There are obvious parallels between CLT (reviewed above) and Fishbach and colleagues' model: In particular, progress is often construed at a more concrete level, whereas commitment is construed at a more abstract level (see Fishbach et al 2006). Thus, the demonstration by Weibel et al (2014; reviewed in the Construal Level Theory section) that intentions lead to consistency, whereas completed actions lead to balancing, is consistent with Fishbach's model: Completed actions could be construed as progress toward the goal allowing for licensing, whereas future intentions could highlight one's commitment to the goal producing consistency. The difficulty with making this parallel more broadly is that in the absence of explicit manipulations of progress versus commitment framings, it is difficult to determine whether participants in other studies construed their initial behaviors in terms of progress or commitment.…”

“…Furthermore, when Ebersole et al (2015) attempted to replicate the first study in this tradition (Monin & Miller 2001, study 1) across many labs and 3,134 participants, they observed a reliable licensing effect, with a 95% confidence interval for d ranging from 0.08 to 0.21. Licensing effects have also been demonstrated in naturally occurring settings (Hofmann et al 2014) and discussed outside of psychology, in marketing (Huber et al 2008), management (Klotz & Bolino 2013, Ormiston & Wong 2013, economics (Brañas-Garza et al 2013;Clot et al 2013Clot et al , 2014bPloner & Regner 2013), nutrition (Chang & Chiou 2014, Hennecke & Freund 2014, Weibel et al 2014, and energy policy ( Jacobsen et al 2012, Tiefenbeck et al 2013).…”

Nazis by Kraut: A Playful Application of Moral Self-Licensing

“…For instance, people who eat non-fattening foods are considered more moral than people who eat fattening foods (Stein & Nemeroff, 1995); oatmeal eaters are perceived as more moral than pie eaters (Oakes & Slotterback, 2004). Consistent with these theoretical links between morality and food choices, moral behavior is found to give one a license to eat less healthy products (Weibel, Messner, & Brügger, 2014). The goal of this paper is to demonstrate the reverse effect.…”

Justified indulgence: self-licensing effects on caloric consumption

“…Caloric value of unhealthy snack intake (Study 1 and 2) and chosen snack (Study 3) served as dependent measures. Hence, as opposed to food choice studies that sometimes provide hypothetical choices (Wilcox et al, 2011), or present pictures of food products (Mukhopadhyay & Johar, 2009;Weibel et al, 2014), our study exposes participants to a direct confrontation with tempting foods. It was hypothesized that participants in the experimental conditions, who received a justification cue, eat more of the unhealthy snacks (Study 1 and 2), and choose snacks of higher caloric quantity (Study 3), than participants in the control conditions.…”