Moral Self-Licensing and the Direct Touch Effect

Do individual PES buyers care about additionality and free-riding? A choice experiment

“…Moreover, studies across various contexts suggest that peo-825 ple tend to chalk up their prosocial behaviour as a kind of social surplus in order to subsequently justify antisocial or morally dubious actions (Monin and Miller, 2001;Merritt et al, 2012;Brañas-Garza et al, 2013;Sass and Weimann, 2015;Clot et al, 2018;Engel and Szech, 2020). This so-called 'moral self-830 licensing dilemma' is particularly delicate for voluntary, nonadditional PES programmes, where the absence of an effective behavioural change on the part of FES providers could result in a net deficit of prosocial behaviour at the societal level.…”