Moral cleansing and moral licenses: experimental evidence


Autoria(s): Brañas Garza, Pablo; Bucheli, Marisa; Espinosa Alejos, María Paz; García-Muñoz, Teresa
Data(s)

08/10/2012

08/10/2012

2012

Resumo

Research on moral cleansing and moral self-licensing has introduced dynamic considerations in the theory of moral behavior. Past bad actions trigger negative feelings that make people more likely to engage in future moral behavior to offset them. Symmetrically, past good deeds favor a positive self-perception that creates licensing effects, leading people to engage in behavior that is less likely to be moral. In short, a deviation from a “normal state of being” is balanced with a subsequent action that compensates the prior behavior. We model the decision of an individual trying to reach the optimal level of moral self-worth over time and show that under certain conditions the optimal sequence of actions follows a regular pattern which combines good and bad actions. We conduct an economic experiment where subjects play a sequence of giving decisions (dictator games) to explore this phenomenon. We find that donation in the previous period affects present decisions and the sign is negative: participants’ behavior in every round is negatively correlated to what they did in the past. Hence donations over time seem to be the result of a regular pattern of self-regulation: moral licensing (being selfish after altruist) and cleansing (altruistic after selfish).

Identificador

1988-088X

http://hdl.handle.net/10810/8763

Idioma(s)

eng

Publicador

University of the Basque Country, Department of Foundations of Economic Analysis II

Relação

DFAEII 2012.09

Direitos

info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess

Palavras-Chave #moral cleansing #moral self-licensing #experiments #moral behaviour
Tipo

info:eu-repo/semantics/workingPaper