Getty Images Does using this bag make its owner more likely to steal and cheat? The Guardian newspaper picked this up recently, and it also makes an appearance in the most recent issue of Conservation magazine: people who buy green products may be, on the whole, more likely to steal and cheat when given the chance.
This claim comes by way of two researchers at the University of Toronto, who were probing a more widely known psychological phenomenon in which people who pat themselves on the back for a good deed often feel entitled to a bit of selfishness later on.
Using student volunteers, the Toronto researchers tested this notion as it relates to green consumerism. They initially quizzed the students on their impressions of people who buy eco-friendly products, and for the most part, they considered such consumers to be more “more cooperative, altruistic and ethical” than ordinary consumers, according to Conservation.
The researchers then set about testing those qualities:
In the second experiment, some students were assigned to check out an online store offering mostly green products, while other students were assigned to an online store carrying mostly conventional products. Half the students in each group were asked to rate the products in the store, and the other half were asked to purchase products.
Afterward, all the students played a seemingly unrelated money-sharing game. The students who had merely rated the green products shared more money than the students who had rated the conventional products. But students who had made purchases in the green store shared less money than those who had shopped in the conventional store.
In the third experiment, the students played a computer game that tempted them to earn money by cheating. The green consumers were more likely to cheat than the conventional purchasers, and they stole more money when asked to withdraw their winnings from envelopes on their desks.
Andy Revkin, my colleague at the Dot Earth blog, suggested that this “moral-license effect,” as the authors put it, may well have something in common with another widely discussed phenomenon known as the “single-action bias” — a term that arises often in discussions of climate change.
From the Center for Research on Environmental Decisions at Columbia University:
In response to uncertain and risky situations, humans have a tendency to focus and simplify their decision making. Individuals responding to a threat are likely to rely on one action, even when it provides only incremental protection or risk reduction and may not be the most effective option. People often take no further action, presumably because the first one succeeded in reducing their feeling of worry or vulnerability. This phenomenon is called the single-action bias.
Whether or not the single-action bias can help explain why students in the Toronto experiment behaved the way they did is an open question, though it seems certain that the study of environmental decision-making — particularly as popular agreement on the gravity of global warming wanes — will continue to be a hot area of research.
“Green products do not necessarily make for better people,” the Toronto researchers told The Guardian. They also said that while much time and treasure has been spent trying to identify green consumers, relatively little research has gone into “how green consumption fits into people’s global sense of responsibility and morality.”