Do good deeds make bad people?

Abstract

According to the so-called ‘self-licensing effect’, committing to a virtuous act in a preceding choice may lead to behave less virtuously in the succeeding decision. Consequently, well-intentioned policies can lead to overall counter-productive effects by licensing people to behave badly in related behaviors. On the other side, motivational crowding theory argues that constraining people to adopt a desirable behavior can backfire. We use of a classroom experiment to test whether a regulatory framework to incentivize individuals to adopt pro-environmental behavior generate similar spillovers in terms of licensing effect than a non-regulatory framework. We show that the way the good deed is caused doesn’t seem to influence the licensing effect. Nevertheless, we found that business- and environmental-orientated majors react adversely to the regulatory framework. We show that environmental-orientated students exhibit higher intrinsically motivations than business-orientated ones. Accordingly, we suggest that the licensing effect is more likely to arise when the preceding ‘virtuous’ act is freely chosen (respectively regulatory caused) for non-intrinsically (respectively intrinsically) motivated individuals

Consistency Versus Licensing Effects of Past Moral Behavior

“…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. Thus, more research is needed to determine the conditions under which anticipated future moral acts will lead to licensing or consistency.…”

“…Similarly, Clot et al (2014a) investigated whether proenvironmental identity interacted with imagining engaging in voluntary versus mandatory proenvironmental behaviors to influence participants' willingness to donate to an environmental charity. When the initial behavior was voluntary (instead of mandatory), high identifiers did not demonstrate licensing effects, whereas low identifiers did.…”

Compensation and Rewards for Environmental Services (CRES) and efficient design of contracts in developing countries. Behavioral insights from a natural field experiment

“…In parallel, an emerging literature on selflicensing demonstrates that doing something morally valuable in a first stage increases the likelihood of doing something less morally valuable at a later stage. According to this theory, prosocial preferences are not exogenous, but context dependent (Khan and Dhar, 2006;Sachdeva et al, 2009;Mazar and Zhong, 2010;Chiou et al, 2011;Clot et al, 2014b), and vary according to a moral regulation process in which good deeds 'purchase' the right to act more selfishly afterwards. In other words, behaviors are highly related to the degree of selfesteem they produce in participants.…”

Moral self-licencing and social dilemmas: an experimental analysis from a taking game in Madagascar

“…Additionally, the social preferences considered by this literature are assumed to be a given (Narloch et al, 2012, Carpenter andSeki, 2010;Castillo and Saysel, 2005;Henrich, 2000), correlated with socio--economic and cultural characteristics, and vulnerable to being crowded out by exogenous mediators such as external regulations (Cardenas et al, 2000) and rewards (Vollan, 2008;Narloch et al, 2012). In contrast, the idea of moral self--licensing that has recently emerged argues that social preferences may be influenced by past behavior (Khan and Dhar, 2006;Mazar and Zhong, 2010;Clot et al 2016;see Blanken et al 2015 for a meta study and Mullen and Monin 2016 for a comprehensive review). 1 WEIRD effect : Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic 2 As a colleague has pointed out, on the one hand, it is possible that students in Madagascar are a relatively homogeneous population in comparison to populations in experimental labs in Europe or North America, which can be more ethnically diverse and exhibit more heterogeneous behaviour.…”