On this green St. Paddy’s day, finally, something that explains some of the operators of, and commenters on, some other blogs. Now, if I can just find some fair trade carbon credits to offset my corned beef and cabbage…
From the Guardian:
How going green may make you mean
Ethical consumers less likely to be kind and more likely to steal, study finds
When Al Gore was caught running up huge energy bills at home at the same time as lecturing on the need to save electricity, it turns out that he was only reverting to “green” type.
According to a study, when people feel they have been morally virtuous by saving the planet through their purchases of organic baby food, for example, it leads to the “licensing [of] selfish and morally questionable behaviour”, otherwise known as “moral balancing” or “compensatory ethics”.
Do Green Products Make Us Better People is published in the latest edition of the journal Psychological Science. Its authors, Canadian psychologists Nina Mazar and Chen-Bo Zhong, argue that people who wear what they call the “halo of green consumerism” are less likely to be kind to others, and more likely to cheat and steal. “Virtuous acts can license subsequent asocial and unethical behaviours,” they write.
The pair found that those in their study who bought green products appeared less willing to share with others a set amount of money than those who bought conventional products. When the green consumers were given the chance to boost their money by cheating on a computer game and then given the opportunity to lie about it – in other words, steal – they did, while the conventional consumers did not. Later, in an honour system in which participants were asked to take money from an envelope to pay themselves their spoils, the greens were six times more likely to steal than the conventionals.
Mazar and Zhong said their study showed that just as exposure to pictures of exclusive restaurants can improve table manners but may not lead to an overall improvement in behaviour, “green products do not necessarily make for better people”. They added that one motivation for carrying out the study was that, despite the “stream of research focusing on identifying the ‘green consumer'”, there was a lack of understanding into “how green consumption fits into people’s global sense of responsibility and morality and [how it] affects behaviours outside the consumption domain”.
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Complete article at the Guardian
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Here is the original press release from the University of Toronto and link to the study:
Buying green can be license for bad behavior, study finds
Those lyin’, cheatin’ green consumers.
Just being around green products can make us behave more altruistically, a new study to be published in a forthcoming issue of Psychological Science has found.
But buying those same products can have the opposite effect. Researchers found that buying green can lead people into less altruistic behaviour, and even make them more likely to steal and lie than after buying conventional products. Buying products that claim to be made with low environmental impact can set up “moral credentials” in people’s minds that give license to selfish or questionable behavior.
“This was not done to point the finger at consumers who buy green products. The message is bigger,” says Nina Mazar, a marketing professor at University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management and a self-admitted green consumer. “At the end of the day, if we do one moral thing, IT doesn’t necessarily mean we will be morally better in other things as well.”
Mazar, along with her co-author Chen-Bo Zhong, an assistant professor of organizational behaviour at the Rotman School, conducted three experiments. The first found that people perceived green consumers to be more cooperative, altruistic and ethical than those who purchased conventional products. The second experiment showed that participants merely exposed to products from a green store shared more money in a subsequent experimental game, but those who actually made purchases in that store shared less. The final experiment revealed that participants who bought items in the green store showed evidence of lying and stealing money in a subsequent lab game.
But are people conscious of this moral green washing going on when they buy green products and, more importantly, the license they might feel to break ethical standards? Professors Mazar and Zhong don’t know – and look forward to exploring that in further research.
The complete study is available at: http://www.rotman.utoronto.ca/newthinking/greenproducts.pdf .
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Maybe the people who buy green have that sort of personality in the first place?
Psychologists jumping onto the nearest bandwagon? Surely not:
http://meteolcd.wordpress.com/2009/03/05/a-conference-on-the-psychology-of-climate-change-denial/
All top class evidence based stuff no doubt….
btw they are also getting into the “whatever it is, it is consistent with the models” meme:
http://www.mind.org.uk/blog/3058_little_boxes
Would this make global warming researchers feel so altruistic in their planet saving enterprise that they would be mean to conventional (sceptical) researchers and would lie and cheat and not share their data,I wonder?
I’ve long sensed that the most evil is done by people who do it in the name of whichever deity they worship. Whether a conventional god or one fabricated for the purposes of do-gooderism such as being green, vegan, or fighting wrong-headed people, they seem to think their noble end justifies whatever means necessary.
______ (fill in the blank) save us from those who know what’s best for everyone else.
cheers
18 March: UK Times: Anjana Ahuja: Is global warming the new apocalypse?
Children used to dread nuclear war but we could now be terrorising them with too much talk of global warming
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/article7066030.ece
lots of detail:
18 March: Australian: European emission trading rocked by scandal over recycled carbon permits
Two carbon exchanges were forced to suspend trading as panic hit investors fearful that they had bought invalid permits…
Efforts to tighten up the market have been stymied by recession, which has reduced Europe’s overall carbon dioxide output and kept the carbon price low…
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/news/european-emission-trading-rocked-by-scandal-over-recycled-carbon-permits/story-e6frg90o-1225842148852
meant to add that Anjana Ahuja who wrote the UK Times apocalypse piece is a CAGW believer.
I have met some of these people. And they do not have “green” souls. You can see it in their eyes. Hey…but who am I to judge?
The “greenest” people I know might not be too opposed to hydrocarbons as an intermediate solution until we develop something better, they plant their gardens and flowers, they are unfazed by Al Gore, and they recycle.
I am not surprised by this study, for, as “green” as I am [hence my name], but also as disassociated with the radical political agendas of most environmentalist movements, I have met these people, and they are not nice.
They just have an axe to grind…and it is a bitter, psychopathic axe to grind at that.
One day, soon, we WILL return to what it means to be “green.”
Paul Vaughan and others talk about this on here.
And may I say that Lovelock is on to something…
Even for all the horribleness of our species, Homo Sapiens [to quote War of the Worlds] “have earned their right to be here.”
We just need to be better stewards. It’s simple.
We need to be like people who observe science and observe and appreciate the world around us [rbateman I caught your comment of the giant sequoias growing in your yard…damn amazing!].
Any sane, rational human being….is an environmentalist.
But along with that unique human trait toward higher logic….we learn to see through the shams and scams….such as the ones looming before us today.
But when the dust clears….the good-natured LOVE for nature, remains….in all of us….well, at least, the best of us.
I don’t think Al Gore has it left in him, though. Watch his eyes. You can see it [or the void thereof] in his eyes.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
“I’ve long sensed that the most evil is done by people who do it in the name of whichever deity they worship.”
Dehumanization and alienation are the two quickest ways to justify any sort of evil. The Rwandan genocide happened sans religious difference, so that theory would clearly be false. However, using the Stalinists and their treatment of Russian Jews or the Chinese slaughters of Tibetan Buddhists would provide further evidence that deity is not necessary for violence or deviation.
Instead, we can assume that violence and self-interested dishonesty are integral parts of humanity, and there are only ways to prevent these things from manifesting themselves in our ordinary behavior, not predispositions to this sort of behavior. I tried to elucidate this point on Motl’s blog last night, but failed miserably, probably due to the early celebration of a certain holiday…
Anyhow, any one person of any particular religion, ethnicity, race, or culture can be found to have engaged in behavior that fits the mold of deviant from societal norms. So it would seem, from this look at deviance, that communal groupings form the controls on our behavior. This is what Travis Hirschi thought with his theory of control. I do not agree with the one size fits all theories.
I think that first, we are born with certain tendencies. Some people are genetically inclined to not care, and automatically dehumanize others. Some people are far more altruistic than others. I do not think that these tendencies are strong enough to overcome environmental factors that are extreme in the positive, negative, or neutral sense (the lack of environment actually enhances the original tendency, like allowing kids to act however they wish).
These people are then placed into their environments, and raised in them. This creates another layer from where we can draw interactional personality. Was this person subject to constant abuse? Excessive affection? Proper balance? Finally, there is the situational determination to make. Given these first two things, how is a certain person and their genetic and environmental background going to react in a given situation?
The conclusion that people who are greens exhibit more behavior towards dishonesty is true, I question. It is entirely possible that there was an undetected selection bias involving one of the two (they were all in the same situation) factors I listed above. They are still wrong about the AGW thing, though. 😀
I mean “That the conclusion…”
Dammit.
Be environmental, but not environMENTAL.
There’s an important truth contained in that study. It shows a disconnect between the green mindset and green actions that far exceeds ordinary religious hypocrisy. The pattern is: “If I am doing the will of gawd, everyone who opposes me must be a devil. My every action is thus sanctified and justified by my holy self-will.” There are no secondary considerations, no recourse, no logic, no law, no truth to stand between green religionists and their objectives, no matter how insane.
Something wicked this way comes.
“Green” has always been a bandwagon and always will be. Until the truth is all sorted out. People need “bandwagons” to ride on to fulfill their lives. It’s a shame that if there is a truth, why can’t the truth fulfill all of our lives for the common good of society? I don’t mean what You think as the truth, I mean the no bones about it, irrefutable truth. Evidence must be exposed and in a way that is black or white, night or day, yes or no. Everyone must comprehend the truth!
My flight was delayed at SFO the other day and I was walking around the terminal for many hours looking for quiet places to use my laptop, eat, read, etc. I noticed that the green “carbon offset” kiosk machine went completely unused the entire time I was there. People just passed it by. Occasionally someone would walk up to it (possibly mistaking it for an ATM), look at it, and then walk away. I wonder how much energy is being wasted to keep that thing running? It must be the biggest joke since Al Gore brought a sapling along for his first class flights to exotic PowerPoint destinations in his sci-fi horror flick.
savethesharks (21:29:04) :
I agree with you! Activists are the most dangerous as they are the “true
believers” and like any cultist, we unwashed are to be shunned or taxed to
purgatory. I’m a Cowboy’s kid, the real, dirty, hairy, sweaty thing. Pop taught me a lot about living things and life in general. I think Pop’s Native American
side was there too. In that love of the land and nature. Now we have Ranchers
prosituting themselves for the filthy lucre of Wind power. “So we can save or family farm!” Ok, what happens when the green bubble bursts? Now what?
“Split atoms, not Birds….”
Nothing like wrapping oneself in a cloak of moral superiority with which to justify one’s own contemptible behavior. No surprise here.
Dave F (21:35:27) :
Well said.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Douglas DC (21:50:16) :
“Split atoms….not birds.”
Nice….I like that [except if you are talking about pigeons, grackles, or starlings…or flocks of gulls…then I except those.]
I have this love hate relationship with bird. I truly HATE pigeons…and wish them ALL to be split in half….every last one. Pigeons are devil-birds.
But I love songbirds and raptors like the peregrine falcon. [I saw one of these urban predators split a pigeon in half and could not have been happier when it happened.]
I agree with you though…wind energy is washed up at the starting gate.
Next!
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
[REPLY – Leave my Friends the Seagulls and my Peace Pigeons alone, you beast! (You can scrag the starlings, though.) ~ Evan]
Daniel H (21:49:18) :
“My flight was delayed at SFO the other day and I was walking around the terminal for many hours looking for quiet places to use my laptop, eat, read, etc. I noticed that the green “carbon offset” kiosk machine went completely unused the entire time I was there. People just passed it by.”
Darwin’s Natural Selection at work.
Enter Wikipedia entry for said Carbon Offset Kiosk:
“Failed experiment. Was discontinued in 2011 and the company sponsoring it went bankrupt.”
Good riddance!
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Evan….you are right about the gulls…at least when they are by themselves.
Read this heart-wrenching story:
http://hamptonroads.com/2010/01/gull-will-need-new-winter-home-after-dealership-closes
But as for pigeons, after dealing with the 60-odd deadly pathogens that they happily spread around with their profuse poop in old buildings I am trying to renovate….I give them no mercy.
It is cool, though, to watch the fastest creature on earth (the real Superman…the Peregrine) pick these nasty plump birds out of the sky like enemy aircraft.
I wish I could get inside a Peregrine’s head and ask him what it feels like being in a free-fall at 200 MPH….right before he nabs his lunch.
I mean….we walk into Wendy’s, Del Taco, or CPK, and its like….EASY DAY….meal.
We don’t have to be aeronautical prodigies and hit our meal at terminal velocity.
We just have to pull out and swipe our debit cards. 🙂
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
I like starlings! Two moved in with me.
Come to think of it, they didn’t actually ask if they could move in, they just showed up in the house, won’t leave, steal food, torment the cat, and poop everywhere.
Hey, kind of like greens!
When you read the hateful rhetoric of many AGW bloggers, you see the same syndrome – a contempt for human beings. Probably indicating an underlying contempt for themselves.
Reminds me of going to church on Sundays. The people that said their amends the loudest and bragged about their contributions were the ones you had to watch out for the rest of the week. Honest people never bragged about their piouty.
George Turner (22:58:49) :
You know what you have to do. Time to get rid of the pests. 🙂
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
These worthless “sociological” “studies” are just red herrings to divert our minds from the real issues such as Climategate and whether CO2 is a pollutant or not. It further gives other fields of pseudo science a place at the ever more capacious trough.
We should not give them the time of day.
Most greenies dont understand nature and the environment at all. When a person denies his position in the food chain and he actually is grabbing food from the animals lower in food chain. Pauchari’s lecture on his being a vegetarian is actually a selfish act of using brute force to deprive food and life of the animals lower in the food chain. As a conservationist, it is important to conserve animals from extinction especially unnecessary extinction. Biology books are full of examples of animals dying in an ugly and painful death from starvation and diseases because the predators have been removed.