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 .
Phil Rowlands (04:20:12) :
From my days on a bike, I think the reason is the sense of freedom you get from being on a bike. You really do feel the rules do not apply to you, and 99 times out of 100, you get away with it merely because you can change direction so fast.
Trouble comes when the laws of physics turn out to apply. That Mack truck just cannot stop or get out of your way. An extreme example, but not an unknown one. I’ve cruised at 30 mph, and even hit 50 mph (in Scotland down Glen Coe). None of it was what I would consider safe these days. Cities were the worst, though.
Phil Rowlands: “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’”
As someone who has been an off-on regular cyclist for over 4 decades, riding on a busy street is not a time to start thinking about morality. Let me put it this way, imagine you are in your car, driving at 30mph and suddenly a vehicle the size of a small battleship (30feet across), with 1foot thick armour plating comes past you at 200mph.
Would you:
a) crap yourself?
b) Get off the road?
That’s the relative proportions/speed of a car/bike!
And over the years, as less and less people and more and more people drive, car owners have become less and less tolerant of cyclists to the point that I will not let my teenage children cycle on roads that I as a 6year old would have been safe to cycle on in my youth.
The behaviour of cyclists is caused by car drivers, and not vica versa (That and there drug soaked bodies — because when you a filled from adrenalin from the fear of all those cars around you, — and you need that adrenalin to get the added boost to get away safely from traffic lights etc. where you are extremely vunerable until you are out in front of the cars and even the most dopey drivers doing their lipstick can see you
I wonder if it occurred to the researchers that liars and cheats might lie about having green credentials.
I hate to bring this up but while we are talking about mean, here are some roots [pun intended] of the green movement.
“Fascist Ecology: The “Green Wing” of the Nazi Party and its Historical Antecedents”
Peter Staudenmaier
http://www.spunk.org/texts/places/germany/sp001630/peter.html
I think Noelene is right. This is a clear case of failure to isolate the variable. It is possible that people who buy “green” just because it is “green”; are just self righteous twits who only do it so they can feel superior and therefore justified in being less ethical elsewhere in life.
Or maybe constant exposure to people like our jet setting AGW nutballs has biased me a bit.
If you read the comments below the article on the Guardian website you get the impression the report certainly touched a nerve. Funnily enough the science of psychology most certainly isn’t settled.
Any body heard from birthday boy Charles? A couple of jiggers of this green hotsauce in a bloodmary will snap him out of a hangover.
I agree with other commenters that the authors may have it backwards – that those buying “green” products may be already doing these other bad things & they are simply buying “green” to sooth some sort of guilty conscience. That being said, I do know people who buy green that I would not put into that category. The human mind is a very complicated thing & it is hard to lump everyone based on a study. The climate is simple compared to individual psychology.
“Professional liberals are too arrogant to compromise. In my experience, they were also very unpleasant people on a personal level. Behind their slogans about saving the world and sharing the wealth with the common man lurked a nasty hunger for power.
They’d double-cross their own mothers to get it or keep it.”
– Harry S Truman
“Richard Heg (04:18:00) :
Would be interesting to apply this research to those who claim they are religious.”
Been done.
Religious (and conservative) people give infinitly more to voluntary charitable causes than the reactionary leftists who want the government to force people into “good” behavior.
“Good” being defined by the lefties, of course.
That explains why some of the faster speeders I see on the interstate are Prius drivers.
“I’m saving gas, so I get to go faster than everyone else!”
Makes sense. You see, the greens are already trying to steal our money by cap-and-trade, huge government subsidies, and “studies” into what ways we are messing the earth up now. And the greens you see promoting this are self-righteous and holier-than-thou. This is not surprising at all.
Note that clicking on the hot sauce picture will lead you to the NSFW full name of that hot sauce. One that ~ctm would [snip] and possibly warn. This is your only warning. 😉
The biggest ‘group’ I’ve belonged to is WUWT, and what I enjoy here are the diverse comments and the humour of all you sceptic participants. WUWT is a bit like some of the Edinburgh Clubs in the Scotish Enlightenment, Tuesday Club, Oyster Club etc except we don’t eat oysters drink copious drafts of claret and play leapfrog on the snow, well, not as an online group any way. Maybe Charles the Moderator is doing some of these things at his ongoing birthday celebration.
Save the Sharks, don’t be so hard on pigeons, we have some wonderful bronze wing pigeons in Australia and crested doves that make whirring sounds with their wings when they take off. Evan, starlings gotta live too. Show some empathy! My favorites are the little blue wrens that hop on to my doorstep on the Mornington Peninsular.
JER0ME (02:50:52) :
“Albatrosses cannot cross the equator? Tell us more…..”
It is indeed such an interesting issue, that it is enough for a separate posting, if you ask me.
But please, no feel-good-science…..
We are forgetting the political component of this, which is by far the more important aspect. Let me remind everyone that when the current battle over healthcare is resolved that Cap&Trade (or whatever the current title is ) is next up in the ring of public and political debate.
http://www.dtnprogressivefarmer.com/dtnag/common/link.do?symbolicName=/ag/blogs/template1&blogHandle=policy&blogEntryId=8a82c0bc268be2db01277155f7330b47&showCommentsOverride=false
Articles from Wednesday report the senators briefed some business groups on the proposal, which had eight separate titles to it: Refining, America’s Farmers, Consumer Refunds, Clean Energy Innovation, Coal, Natural Gas, Nuclear and Energy Independence.
Kind of interesting that they laid out some details to business people on St. Patrick’s Day. Maybe they are counting on the luck of the Irish.
Reports stated that comparable to the House bill the proposal would reduce carbon emissions by 17 percent in 2020 and up to 80 percent by 2050. (The House bill passed last year went to 83 percent).
The bill also would supersede the EPA using the Clean Air Act to regulate emissions and ensure that it would only go after major emitters, those producing over 25,000 tons of greenhouse-gases per year.
Like a bill proposed by Sens. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., and Susan Collins, R-Maine, the bill also would have a “cap-and-dividend” model which would include rebates back to consumers on the sale of pollution permits.
I think this study could well be valid.
Some research I read about diet drinks showed a similar psychology.
The study was on why those who drank a lot of these drinks actually put weight on.
Those who drank diet drinks felt that they could ‘reward’ themselves with extra calories because there were none (or very few) in the drinks.
This thinking seems to apply to various behaviours.
Shakespeare was a wonderful judge of character and got it right all those years ago back in the Little Ice Age, with this quote from Julius Caeser
Let me have men about me that are fat,
Sleek-headed men and such as sleep a-nights.
Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look,
He thinks too much; such men are dangerous.
And look what happened to poor Caesar. Apologise in advance to all those lean readers who are not Vegie “Green” card holders.
1) it could be that this started with Ed Abbey’s book: “The Monkey Wrench Gang”, which was an early advocate of ecoterrorism.
2) The TV comedy “South Park” also did a take off on this with an episode regarding the sanctimoniousness of Prius owners, whose farts didn’t stink.
WUWT, given your post I advise you to check your premises.
In that regard, I suggest the last stanza of Robert Frosts poem “The Road Less Traveled” ~1920;
“I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”
WUWT, check you premises. Your road taken on this post is, unfortunately, very well traveled.
John
Obviously none of you are aware that according to South Park people who drive Hybrids create “smug” and that this “smug” when concentrated in cities like “San Francisco” make the living environment there unbearable. So yes, going green can actually have a detrimental effect on the environment. Check out the lated episode of South Park for details. Hilarious!
George Turner, you sound like Dr Doolittle with your appealing menagerie. We have a few adoptees too, including a duckling we bought at the Market for $3. A couple of years later she cost us $500 for a hysterectomy. Ducks often develop problems with egg laying, as we learned to our cost.
I noticed the same tendency of folks who like to advertise their benevolent attitudes are often not all that benevolent at all. Years ago I lived up in Coal Creek Canyon here in Colorado just above Boulder. There were lots of “save the whales” folks who lived up there as well. You could tell because they had 4 or 5 stickers on their cars attesting to their love for ecology and the planet.
One day after work a line of about 15 cars was headed up the canyon, (I was near the end of the line), when a doe tried to cross the road. She came over the top of the rise on my right and was going a bit too fast when she saw the line of cars moving up the road, and locked up all four and tried to come to a stop, but she was too near the edge of the precipice and slide down the dirt slope and slammed into the side of a car going about 30 mph farther up the line. The impact spun her around and bounced her off the dirt embankment and then she rolled into traffic, and spun like a top a couple revolutions. She sort of sat there in a pile for second then scrambled to her feet and tried to get off the road, walking into the brush on the other side of the road some what awkwardly. The driver of the car who she hit never even slowed down, the car in front of me only tapped the brakes and pulled around her like she was a pile of trash in the middle of the road and went on.
Out of 15 or so cars who saw the incident only two people stopped to see if the deer had been injured.
It was not any of the folks who had “save the whales”, or “earth day” stickers on their bumpers.
Larry
I think that if you tar all environmentalists with the same brush then the argument will be lost.
The problem is the extremists, politicians,WWF and others and vested interests. These are where the attacks should be made. Also turning the matter into a left/ right debate will get nowhere there are many on the right that believe in Climate Change nee Dangerous Global Warming.
The South Park Hybrid song link!