Better not buy green – you’ll turn into some kind of moral deviant

Or so says a study by The University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management.

Well ok, not exactly. But what the study, conducted by academics Nina Mazar and Chen-Bo Zhong, does say is that while being around green products will make us more altruistic, buying them can set up “moral credentials in people’s minds.”

In other words, by using Ecover, we think we’ve got some moral credits in the bank and so slack off in other areas.

Three experiments were carried out. The first found that green consumers are perceived to be generally more cooperative and ethical. The second showed that merely being exposed to products from a green store made consumers share more money with others than the norm…but people who bought products shared less.

In the third experiment, consumers who bought stuff from the green store showed a higher than average incidence of lying and cheating in a lab game.

What does this prove? That perhaps buying green products is seen as a bit of a sacrifice in terms of quality and effectiveness, so once you’ve been seen to have ‘done your bit’, you can morally relax a bit (it would have been interesting to look at other ethical products like Fair Trade).

Or, according to the researchers in their conclusion, “While mere exposure to green products can have a positive societal effect by inducing pro-social and ethical acts, purchasing green products may license indulgence in self-interested and unethical behaviors.”

It’s an interesting point though, whether you could take the first part of that experiment – where people acted more ethically after exposure towards (but not purchase of) green products – and use it to alter and influence behaviour.

Could charity shops for example, surround themselves with ethical stuff to make people give more? Could political figures even create ethical ‘mood music’ when asking the rest of us to make recession based sacrifices?

Image – Bob the Lomond

Via Science Daily