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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This report reminds me of an old 20th century report on windmills and local people. Apparently the people most likely to complain about these eyesores were green consumers and green consumers were most likely to be in the AB social group with the highest incomes and as there is a close correlation between your spending power and your damage to the environment, those who said they were most green, were doing the most damage.
Reply: Or not ~ ctm
Your quite humourous!
“She was a ‘good’ woman, and you could tell by the hunted looks on her friends faces” is fairly descriptive of the type.
This is an extension of a concept I read about in 2007, that of ‘conspicuous virtue’, which I thought described the type rather well
http://volokh.com/posts/1174748857.shtml
Moral balancing, aka hypocrisy. Happens in all walks of life involving people trying to make an impression on others, using others for gain, or trying to have a moral high ground over others.
I am constantly amazed by the attitudes of those that worship at the alter of AGW. They truly believe that CO2 is ‘killing the planet’, yet they happily continue to emit the stuff.
They waste huge amounts of electricity commenting on blogs, pointing out how evil us ‘deniers’ are by wasting electricity.
Coal trains are apparently ‘death trains’, so what the hell does that say about people that buy carbon credits? “Yes I believe that CO2 is killing the planet for our children, But I am happily BUYING MY WAIT OUT OF IT.” How is that any different to paying off the jury in a murder trial?
Just because their car does 1 more mile to the gallon than mine, they consider themselves to be reversing global warming. In reality they are far worse than I, because they believe in AGW, yet continue to emit huge amounts of CO2.
Why are they not living on carbon neutral farming communes with their AGW brethren, instead of buying their way out of guilt?
I meant “BUYING MY WAY OUT OF IT”, silly typo.
savethesharks: “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.”
The “greenest” people live in the centre of cities (no need for cars), they live in high density housing (least land use), they can’t afford to recycle, because they can’t afford to buy it in the first place, and they wouldn’t ever in their life consider buying “organic” cause even if they could afford it, it would be a waste of their money.
In reality “Green” is a luxury good offered to the wealthy classes by slick marketing men to soak up the discretionary dollars/pounds/yen after they have made all their money “trashing their planet” during their highly paid, and therefore highly consumptive (in planetary resource terms) day jobs.
And as for recycling, if you think about it for even one second, the best way to capture CO2 is to bury as much plastic and organic waste in massive municipal tips and then leave it there. Recycling involves huge quantities of energy in transport and processing all the salve the conscience of people who think that we should not lock as much hydrocarbon as possible in waste tips – and divert as much petrochemicals as quickly as possible from oil well to waste dump thus preventing its CO2 being liberated into the atmosphere.
Green = Total non-nonsensical market-led hypocrisy to fool the gullible-rich.
This study of mean green consumers is enlightening. I’d like to see the results of a psychological study of “mean green marketing”. In the past, a knock on the door by a peddler was usually a magazine or vacuum cleaner salesman. Now “green alternative energy” suppliers are knocking on doors trying to sell their wares. I received such a visit last year. The salesman used a deceptive approach, “We are working with your electric utility company”, “We’re promoting green energy use”. My initial thoughts were that he was offering an energy audit. Before I realized the real purpose of his visit, he said he needed to see one of my electric bills. After I complied, he then explained that “We are selling green electricity” generated by wind power, you are currently buying “brown electricity” from your utility company. (This statement was made to get me, the prospect, feeling guilty that I am not a good environmental citizen). He then quoted an electricity supply price that was more than double of what I was currently paying. Before I had a chance to respond (indicating my willingness or not), he said “I need to have you sign right here”. Taken aback by his deceptive and aggressive approach, as well as my unwillingness to see my electric supply costs more than double, I told him no deal. After he left, I went back into my house and got out my flashlight and magnifier to see if I could track down a few of those brown electrons darting up and down my copper wires. 🙂
I did a bit of research afterwards, and found that if the demand for “green electricity” exceeds supply (as often happens during periods of low wind activity), the wind energy supply company simply pays an offset to another energy supply company for the deficiency. There is no guarantee that the green energy customer is truly buying electricity from green sources 100% of the time, but he is certainly paying much more. And in the vice-versa case of non-green energy customers, usually a portion of their energy really does comes from green sources.
Penn and Teller did one of their shows on the topic of AGW alarmism and green marketers using guilt to market their products, as well as convincing people to calculate their carbon footprint, and if positive, to purchase offsets through a trading scheme. My belief is that “mean green marketing” is only going to get worse, especially with its encouragement by the government.
JER0ME (01:02:07) :
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So the conclusion is that actually buying products described as green makes people behave more dishonestly subsequently. This is , as the assignment was random, regardless of their actual desires to buy green products.
The product causes it (or the act of buying it), not the moral choice in doing so.
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A good point, and if true, does not bode well. As we are ‘forced’ to purchase more and more green products (“Our bread is Green!”) it would suggest we get a little less honest.
But then again, green products are invariably more expensive than ‘regular’ products. When we are forced (through little or no choice) to buy more expensive products with dubious claims, I think people do become more willing to fight back – when you effectively steal from me, I will retaliate.
I think we can all see the political ramifications.
[Note, ‘green’ does not necessarily mean they have any kind of lesser environmental effect than any other product]
This is where carbon credits will lead people. Buy credits and behave badly, then sell it off to poor people in developing countries who will promptly ignore them and do what they have to do to cook food and improve the lot of their kids.
Al Gore comes to mind. What a Watermelon hypocrite!
I am certain Anthony Watts has a lower carbon footprint than Al Gore.
http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/2007/02/28/er-outlook-sustainability-my-missing-article/
http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/2008/05/12/what-ive-been-up-to-electrifying-my-ride/
http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/2007/11/25/sustainable-bathrooms-and-closets/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/02/07/swapping-my-lights-fantastic/
Gore:
http://www.thedailygreen.com/environmental-news/latest/al-gore-house-47062202
It may be an interesting comment on human psychology that people who are called to follow a Big Cause soon begin to believe that all other lesser good causes can be sacrificed to it. Animal rights and “Pro-Life” advocates beigin to believe that it is correct to murder pharmaceutical researchers and abortionists in order to promote thier Big Cause, and don’t get me started on religion. Similarly, colonists of other nations (the British in India, the European settlers in the US) believed that they had a moral duty to pursue their Big Cause of bringing enlightenment to the noble savages / building a homeland for the poor and huddled masses… and here we go, I’ve now reached Godwin’s rule. It is so easy for large groups of people to be brought into lockstep (or goose-step) behind a cause. It can make them blind to the evil being done in their names.
A more adult and less simplistic mindset occurs when people can balance a number of “goods” in their minds, to produce a harmonised best solution in society. This takes the opposite of single-mindedness and is a rare commodity in humans.
I think it is evolutionary – there are times when, for survival, you need to focus the tribe on a great task – and this psychological quirk persists and causes one heck of a lot of trouble in a pluralistic society.
I think I’ll take some of my cyber dollars and buy carbon credits.
Value on paper would be at par.
This seems to tie in with stuff from developmental psychology.
Green is linked to postmodernism, which was anti-authority, because sometimes authorities can be oppressive.
So postmodernist education tends to teach people to value themselves for who they are, and not how some authority might judge them.
However, this has the unfortunate side effect that people become taught to value themselves for who they are, regardless of whether who they are is worth valuing. Ahem.
Many kids could do with just learning to fit in with society’s norms about basic ethics, like, don’t steal, be kind, be considerate, etc.
But authorities were the traditional source for these teachings; the church, the teachers, the parents, etc.
So by postmodernism’s deconstruction of all authorities, kids don’t learn much from authorities anymore. They just learn to “value themselves”. So the net effect is that they can actually become more selfish.
Plus, thanks to postmodernism’s intellectualising about “oppressive power structures”, it is very hard to teach someone that they are being selfish, as they can just come back at you and accuse you of sexism, racism, imperialism, being a middle class white guy, or whatever.
So you get this weird combination of “high ideals” but in practice they really aren’t willing to be told that they are wrong. They won’t abide to standards of objectivity.
Very much like global warming.
And that’s how Stef. sees it.
savethesharks (22:49:06) :
Observing the birds at the feeder:
The Starlings love to buzz in and run all the other birds off, showing off. Thier tactics include slamming into the feeder, tossing thier ‘hair’ about to act menacing, strewing seed and making plenty of alarming noise.
They give way to one bird: Woody Woodpecker doesn’t come around very often, but when he does, it’s to make sure Wilma Woodpecker is looked after, and he’ll get right in the the Starlings face and challenge their B.S.
It’s a great contrast in behavior.
I don’t think people who are randomly forced into a “green” shop can be equated to be “geeenies” in the first place.
What this study shows me, is that people who believe bogus “green” marketing are more likely to cheat/steal.
The definition of “greenie” seems out of context. Just because people choose a product with a “green” sticker (applied by marketing) does not make them greener than someone who sees through the hype, who probably chooses a product based on lowest cost.
What I find amazing, is that this study was funded in the first place. The whole premise is bogus, it’s throw away science supplied for tabloid fodder, and self supporting job justification, made obvious by the lack of conclusion and obligatory call for more funding to “look forward to exploring that in further research.”
I wonder who was taxed (mugged) to pay for this. Are there no proper jobs for these people?
Would be interesting to apply this research to those who claim they are religious.
I’ve observed something similar in the behaviour of cyclists. Running red lights, riding on the pavement, travelling the wrong way down a ‘one way street’ and other similar things. I’ve often wondered if they might have felt themselves morally superior in some way and used this as justification for their rulebreaking.
I used to think that was just me being a ‘grumpy old git’ but I’m not so sure now.
–Phil
Greenies can now get drunk responsibly – English brewer Adnams introduces “Carbon Neutral” beer – with a little help from the UEA…..
http://about.adnams.co.uk/post/news/2008/06/east-green-on-draught.aspx
“green” makes you mean, all right – and sanctimonious, judgmental, condescending, and removes the possibility for empathy of others less well off.
And bombastic to boot.
Perhaps I could explain the greenies without such nefarious undertones… for everything they do they’re paying ridiculous markups. Organic whatever – at least double if not triple. Organic or earth friendly sheets and clothes, cleaning supplies, solar panels for the house, Prius, nontoxic paints for the home remodel, bamboo floors, etc
These poor people, I posit, are struggling to make ends meet. In all likelihood they are living of their *snicker* plastic – it’s tough for them to keep up with the other Greenses down the street.
Watch Discovery Planet Green sometime or check out their website. The “green” movement (not the real greens but the Goreist-types, Neo-Greens) is as much if not more about conspicuos consumption than it is the environment. I think that for every 5, maybe 10 greens there is at least one guy/gal asking them to “save the planet by buying my product”
These folks might not be mean, maybe they’re just broke!
/sarcoff
Carbon offsets, moral offsets. No difference really. Years ago, I rather poorly dubbed it “guilt liberation” and it’s entirely predictable behaviour.. a person who holds the door for another person is LESS likely to do it a 2nd time. A person who goes to church every Sunday is LESS likely to give charitably (hold the door) during the week.
Green living is a way for people to “pay it forward”, enabling them to build the balance of credit in their moral chequing account. The more recycled bog-roll they buy, the further they will then be able to drive, guilt-free, in their SUVs.
A beautiful site about Albatrosses:
http://www.earthlife.net/birds/albatross.html
(I love it when a link is titled
“Return to The Procellariiformes”)
Stefan,
I’m not sure if you recall a few months back you thoroughly schooling me in developmental stages. Do you have any recommendations on reasonably approachable writings/books on the subject?
..and thanks again for your replies in that thread, very enlightening!
———-
Furthermore:
“But, Dr Rudkin says, parents shouldn’t fret too much: if it were not climate change, children would find other issues to fixate on: “My personal opinion is that we all need something to worry about.””
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/article7066030.ece
———-
RESPONSE:
They don’t need to find, it is being rammed down their throats in Government TV propaganda between kid’s shows. This would be funny if it did not have such dire potential consequences for the future.
1 March, 2010
“Baby survives parents’ global warming suicide pact”
“A seven-month-old girl survived for three days alone with a bullet in her chest after being shot by her parents as part of a suicide pact”
“Francisco Lotero, 56, and Miriam Coletti, 23, shot their daughter and her toddler brother before killing themselves.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/southamerica/argentina/7344329/Baby-survives-parents-global-warming-suicide-pact.html
Peter (04:14:00) :
quite right. That is why the study was not about ‘greenies’ at all, but the purchase of ‘green’ products by anyone.
What this study shows me, is that people who believe bogus “green” marketing are more likely to cheat/steal.
The definition of “greenie” seems out of context. Just because people choose a product with a “green” sticker (applied by marketing) does not make them greener than someone who sees through the hype, who probably chooses a product based on lowest cost.
But the study shows us that anybody buying ‘green’ products are then more likely to cheat.
Regarding the rest of your comment, I think it is a valuable study. We are prone to very poorly understood impulses, and this highlights the theory that ‘green’ products are actually bad for the general social well-being. We need to rethink the whole concept altogether. This is entirely regardless of the actual ecological benefit of the product in question.
It is much better to read the study itself and wholly ignore the press article IMO.
A good allegorical case:
One day you read an article on subject ‘X’. It seems fairly accurate, although you have little knowledge of the subject itself. You take it at face value.
The next day you read an article about a subject ‘Y’ you understand extremely well. You can immediately see how completely uninformed the writer is, and how much of it is merely made up to fill column inches, and that most of it is completely wrong.
Why would you believe anything different about the first article? I don’t any more, having seen so many of subject ‘Y’.