Good day. My name is Nina Mazar.
And today, I want to talk to you about our model pendulum or how the social and
moral actions that we engaging in the here and now do not just happen in a
vacuum, but actually effects our subsequent behaviors and decisions.
So, let's first engage in a short exercise.
I would like you to think about a recent situation where you were tempted to go
against your social and moral beliefs, and where you gave into that temptation.
How did that make you feel? And do you think it changed how you
subsequently behaved? And if so, how, why?
Well, I recently passed by a group of students that was raising money for food
bank. And here, I found myself being tempted to
be selfish because I was thirsty, I was tired.
And I was thinking, oh, I could use the change to buy myself a warm cup of tea
and in that moment, I'm ashamed to say, it just felt like the better idea and I
went with the cup of tea. But once I had the cup of tea and I had a
few sips, you know, I said, I feel bad about myself because that was not the
person how I thought of myself. I have a different self image of myself
and somehow, you know, it didn't feel right, I should have used my change to
actually donate that money to a good cause.
So, without really understanding what was happening, I subsequently found myself
being particularly nice to other people. I would hold the door open for the
people, I would smile at other people, I would engage in small talk.
And what I was basically doing is I was compensating for my previous selfish
behavior to reestablish my positive moral view of myself.
And that's basically what a moral pendulum is.
So, the good news is that we are, in general, motivated to do good things.
And sometimes, when we transgress, you know, that happens once in a while
because there are a lot of temptations around us.
Then, we will be highly motivated to compensate for those transgressions, to
reestablish the positive view of ourselves.
Now unfortunately, the bad news is, a pendulum swings both ways.
So, we are likely, least likely to scrutinize moral implications of our
actions right after our moral self has just experienced a boost.
So, after we have engaged in a virtuous act, a good act, a moral act, so a good
deed, it's highly likely that we feel very, very good about ourselves.
As a consequence, we have earned ourselves some more credits or
credentials that license ourselves to subsequently be more selfish, if we find
ourselves in a situation where we can benefit from them.
And that's basically the question that my co-author, Chen-Bo Zhong and I, that we
wanted to test and we decided that we wanted to test it in the domain of green
consumption. Because over the years, consumers have
become increasingly attentive to social and ethical conservations.
And this includes, actually, my co-author and me.
And so, we thought, well, maybe if people engage in green consumption and we
moralize green consumption, that might lead to a licensing effect.
But before we went out to test that, we actually first ran a very quick survey.
We had half of our students rate how altruistic, how cooperative, how ethical
they thought a person is that purchases conventional products.
And we ask the other half of the students to rate how they thought of a person that
purchases organic and, and, and environment-friendly products on those
same three dimensions. And what did we find?
We actually did find that people thought that people who purchase green products,
environment-friendly products, organic products that they have higher moral and
pro-social value. So, in all three dimensions that we had,
those people were rated higher than people who purchase conventional
products. So, based on, on that observation, we
thought, okay, green consumption might actually lead to a licensing effect
further down the road. And here's how we went out to test it.
So, we designed two online stores. One store that carried mainly
conventional products, one store that carried mainly green products.
Both stores had the same number of products, the same type of products, the
same prices, and we simply randomly assigned half of our students to one
store, the other half to the other store. But the students didn't know that both
stores existed. They only saw this one store.
And within each store type, half of our students were asked to simply browse
through the store and then rate the products based on the design and on the
informativeness of, of their description. While the other half was invited to
purchase items. So, we asked them, choose products that
you would like to purchase and put them in your shopping cart.
You can do this with up to $25 in value, and we told them that 1 in every 25
students would be randomly selected to actually receive the items that they had
in their cart for free from us. So, half of the students basically were
merely exposed to the products, while the other half of students, they actually
made purchasing decisions. So, that was the first part of the
experiment. And then, in the second part of the
experiment, in an ostensibly unrelated task, we told participants that they
would engage in something that has been called the dictator game, actually, a
variation of the dictator game. And what is the dictator game?
Well, imagine you come to the lab and we tell you, you know what, you have been
paired with an anonymous other person that is sitting in a different room.
You will never find out who that other person is and that other person will
never find out who you are. And you know what, randomly you are now,
you have been selected to play the role of the dictator.
And as a dictator, we've given you $6 for real, and you decide how much of the $6
you want to keep for yourself versus give to the other person in the other room.
So, you can decide, there is no right or wrong answer.
And the nice thing about this very simple game is that since there isn't really any
downside to not showing any money, because there are no social consequences,
if you want, you can keep every, everything, so the entire $6.
But if you do care about altruism, you will share.
And so, it's a very nice simple task to measure how, how altruistic people are.
So now, what did we find in our experimental session?
We actually found that people who had just purchased in the green store, they
ended up sharing significantly less money with their anonymous other person than
those participants who had just purchased in the conventional store.
And that fits very nicely with that licensing hypothesis.
So, the idea that those people who had just purchased green products, they felt
very good about themselves. They pat themselves on the back.
They felt morally superior. And that earned themself the license to
subsequently be a bit more selfish because it would not threaten their view
that they had about themselves. Now, remember that we had a variation in
that purchasing task. Only half of our participants actually
were purchasing, right, the other half was only exposed to the products, so they
could not really engage in a good deed. And for those participants who are merely
exposed to the products, we actually did not find any licensing effect whatsoever.
In fact, we actually found the opposite. So, people who were purchasing the green
store, we're sharing significantly more money with the anonymous other person
than those who had purchased in the conventional store.
And that fits very nicely with something that has been coined, the priming effect.
So, a priming effect happens when subtly cues in the environment activate
associated norms, that then lead to corresponding behavior.
So, for my opinion, two of the most or two of the coolest priming experiments
show, for example, how exposure to the upper[UNKNOWN] increases creativity.
And another one shows how exposure to pictures of exclusive upscale restaurants
increase or improves people's eating manners.
And, and I think along similar lines, people who have been exposed to green
products being exposed to the green products activated those higher moral
norms that people seem to have when it comes to green products and that lead
them to behave consistently with those, with those beliefs and norms.
Now, you can say, okay, so what? So, people who purchase in the green
store, they were a bit less altruistic. But that's not necessarily a bad thing,
right? And, you would be right if you're saying
that. But what my co-author and I were
wondering was, well, how strong can the licensing effect actually get?
What did even make people transgress in such a way that they would engage in
clear immoral transgressions, such as lying or even stealing.
And that's what we tested in our second experiment.
So, again, we had our two stores, the conventional store and the green store.
This time, we only ask participants to purchase in either of those two stores,
it was the first part of the experiment. And then, in the second part of the
experiment, the ostensibly unrelated task.
We we asked them to participate in a computer-based visual perception task.
So, how did that visual perception task look like?
Imagine you're sitting in front of the computer, in front of the computer
screen, and you'll see a box or a square on that computer screen.
And that square is divided by one diagonal line, and for one second, you
see 20 dots scattered inside that box, then they disappear.
And you just simply have to say whether there more dots on the left or more dots
on the right side of that diagonal line. And it, imagine further that there are 90
such trials, and on each trial, the pattern of the dots is, is very
different. Now what happens, oh, I actually should
say that people are extremely good at this task, they're very, very accurate,
because of, our visual perception is fairly good.
But now, what happens when we introduce a payment scheme such that every time you
say that there are more dots on the left, you earn half a cent.
Every time you say that there are more dots on the right, you earn 10 times the
amount, 5 cents. So, now I bet, oh, and let's imagine that
the computer pays you regardless if your answer is correct or not.
So now, I bet when you see that there are more dots on the lower pay side, you will
find yourself tempted to just simply say, hey, there are more dots on the
right-hand side, so the higher pay side. And, and so that you earn more money.
And that's what we wanted to see. We wanted to see would people cheat for
more money. What did we find?
Well, consistent with the licensing effect, people who had just purchased in
the green store, well, they actually ended up cheating significantly more for
higher pay than those people in the conventional store.
Actually, in fact, the people in the conventioal store were completely honest.
And, and not only that. So, once the computer task was over,
participants would see on the final screen how much money they earned and
they were instructed to pay themselves out of an envelope with cash that they
would find on their desk. And what we wanted to see is, would
people take out the amount of money that they see on the screen?
Or would they overpay themselves? So, basically steal some money from us.
And again, people who had just purchased in a green store also took out more money
than what they were supposed to. So overall, because of lying and because
of stealing, people in the green store overpaid themselves by about $0.83 more
than those participants in a conventional store.
And that might not seem like a lot, but it is a lot.
When you think about that, if people were completely honest and accurate in that
visual perception task, they would have made only about $2.
So, what's the morale of this research that I just presented to you?
Well, if you're about to say that green people are bad people, that they are
immoral and not social, think again, because that is not the takeaway.
So, it's not the takeaway simply because we did not compare green people to
non-green people. We had the same group of students and we
just randomly assinged them to one store or the other store.
So, the takeaway of our experiment is that if you engage in actions that
produce a sense of moral, of moral glow that make you feel superior that then,
you are more likely to subsequently transgress.
So, you license yourself for, to transgress further down the road.
So, as long we engage in behaviors that we moralize, such as, for example,
purchasing green products, we will find the licensing effect.
But if we do not moralize green consumption, if we were to engage in it
just because it is, it feels like the right thing to do, it is a norm, we don't
pat ourselves on the back. Then, we would not expect the licensing
effect of then we would not expect to find the licensing effect.
The licensing effect requires that you feel a boost to your self-concept.
So, the good news is that many of us wanted a good and that many of us think
of themselves as good pro-social and as moral human beings.
We just need a bit, we just need to be a bit cautious about, when we engage in
good behaviors, that we don't feel superior, and that we don't feel like,
that we have done enough. Because if we feel that way, then we will
be less motivated to continue doing good and we'll be more likely to license
ourselves to transgress further down the road.
And I think even the most ethical ones among us, they can benefit from such kind
of a self-reflection from time to time. And that's basically all I have to tell
you about the moral pendulum. Thank you.