We’ve all done it, reminded ourselves that we have been good before we do something bad. Perhaps just before we eat something a bit too fattening, buy that excessive luxury, or don’t giving a dollar to charity at the store we simply remind ourselves, “It’s okay, I was good earlier”.
It’s so common, Subway ran an ad campaign on it in the ’90s. The logic being: come on, admit it, you were good earlier, so doing something questionable (like eating at Subway) doesn’t really count.As it turns out, this is a well-studied psychological phenomenon, called Moral Licensing.
In a review of the studies of the subject, Anna C. Merritt, Daniel A. Effron, and Benoıˆt Monin, found that “Past good deeds can liberate individuals to engage in behaviors that are immoral, unethical, or otherwise problematic, behaviors that they would otherwise avoid”.
In the first experiment they mention, subjects were given two hiring tasks relating to hiring a new person into a group with past racial tension. In the first, the best qualified candidate is an African American, in the second there are only white candidates. It is explained to the subjects that the previous post holder was an African American and left due to harassment from their co-workers, so when the researchers asked subjects, “Is the job better suited for a white person, a black person, or equally so for both races?”, there is a decent argument to be made for one answer above the others.
As you might guess though, many people don’t wish to answer in a manner that makes them seem prejudiced.
The Gap Between Who We are and Who We Want to Be Sam Gosling
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The Gap Between Who We are and Who We Want to Be
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