Australian company Aussie-Bum just launched a new line of eco-friendly underwear. It’s manly, lightweight, and made of banana fiber—the perfect match for a sustainable lifestyle. The company’s marketing material touts the environmental benefits of banana underwear. What it doesn’t mention is that owning a pair may make you behave badly.
New research shows that buying green products makes people more likely to cheat and steal. Although the mere presence of ecofriendly options tips consumers’ subconscious toward cooperation and generosity, actually buying them does the opposite. “After having purchased green products as opposed to conventional ones, people shared less of their money with an anonymous other person,” says lead author Nina Mazar, experimental psychologist at the University of Toronto. “They became more selfish, less altruistic.”
Mazar and her coauthor designed two online storefronts. One of them carried mostly green goods, such as compact fluorescent lightbulbs and organic potato chips, and the other carried mostly conventional products—incandescent bulbs, Pringles, and the like. Students who volunteered for the study got $25 to spend, and the researchers sat them down in front of one of the two online storefronts. After shopping, the volunteers had to decide how much of a $6 gift to give away to an imaginary (although they didn’t know it) partner. Participants who had been assigned to the green store were stingier than those who had been assigned to the conventional store.
In a second experiment, participants shopped in the green or conventional store and then played a game “where they had opportunity to be dishonest as well as actually steal money from us,” Mazar says. It turned out that green purchasers did both. First, they cheated on some data gathering for monetary benefit; then they paid themselves more out of an envelope on the table than they had actually earned. “It was real money that was involved,” Mazar says.
The effect is called “moral credentialing,” explains Benoît Monin, professor of psychology at Stanford University. “Having bought the green products, people feel that they’ve established to themselves and to others that they’re good people. Then when later the opportunity to make a few extra dollars comes around, they’re less concerned about cheating because they can look back and say, well, I’m a good person, I buy green toilet paper, and as a result they are more lenient in applying the moral standards,” Monin explains. “It’s okay for me to cut some corners here, because I’m a good person after all.”
You may fear that environmental marketers are creating a scourge of the evil green, but Mazar has hope. Moral credentialing should apply only in cases where do-gooders experience a moral glow, she says. If saving the planet were the norm, rather than proof that one neighbor is better than another, it would not license subsequent bad behavior. Her results have not stopped Mazar from purchasing organic food and energy-efficient lightbulbs. Does it make her cheat and steal? “I don’t know. I hope not, but at the end of the day I’m also just human.”
Nina Mazar and Chen-Bo Zhong, “Do Green Products Make Us Better People?” Psychological Science, published online on March 5, 2010.
Read more stories by Jessica Ruvinsky.