Self-licensing (also moral self-licensing, moral licensing, or licensing effect) is a term used in

social psychology Social psychology is the methodical study of how thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others. Although studying many of the same substantive topics as its counterpart in the field ...

and

marketing Marketing is the act of acquiring, satisfying and retaining customers. It is one of the primary components of Business administration, business management and commerce. Marketing is usually conducted by the seller, typically a retailer or ma ...

to describe the

subconscious In psychology, the subconscious is the part of the mind that is not currently of focal awareness. The term was already popularized in the early 20th century in areas ranging from psychology, religion and spirituality. The concept was heavily popu ...

phenomenon whereby increased confidence and security in one's

self-image Self-image is the mental picture, generally of a kind that is quite resistant to change, that depicts not only details that are potentially available to an objective investigation by others (height, weight, hair color, etc.), but also items that ...

self-concept In the psychology of self, one's self-concept (also called self-construction, self-identity, self-perspective or self-structure) is a collection of beliefs about oneself. Generally, self-concept embodies the answer to the question ''"Who am I? ...

tends to make that individual worry less about the consequences of subsequent

immoral Immorality is the violation of moral laws, norms or standards. It refers to an agent doing or thinking something they know or believe to be wrong. Immorality is normally applied to people or actions, or in a broader sense, it can be applied to gr ...

behavior and, therefore, more likely to make immoral choices and act immorally. In simple terms, self-licensing occurs when people allow themselves to indulge after doing something positive first; for example, drinking a diet soda with a greasy hamburger and fries can lead one to subconsciously discount the negative attributes of the meal's high caloric and

cholesterol Cholesterol is the principal sterol of all higher animals, distributed in body Tissue (biology), tissues, especially the brain and spinal cord, and in Animal fat, animal fats and oils. Cholesterol is biosynthesis, biosynthesized by all anima ...

content. A large subset of this effect, the moral credential effect, is a

bias Bias is a disproportionate weight ''in favor of'' or ''against'' an idea or thing, usually in a way that is inaccurate, closed-minded, prejudicial, or unfair. Biases can be innate or learned. People may develop biases for or against an individ ...

that occurs when a person's track record as a good

egalitarian Egalitarianism (; also equalitarianism) is a school of thought within political philosophy that builds on the concept of social equality, prioritizing it for all people. Egalitarian doctrines are generally characterized by the idea that all h ...

establishes in them an unconscious ethical certification, endorsement, or license that increases the likelihood of less egalitarian decisions later. This effect occurs even when the audience or moral

peer group In sociology, a peer group is both a social group and a primary group of people who have similar interests ( homophily), age, background, or social status. Members of peer groups are likely to influence each others' beliefs and behaviour. Durin ...

is unaware of the affected person's previously established moral credential. For example, individuals who had the opportunity to recruit a woman or Black person in one setting were more likely to say later, in a different setting, that a job would be better suited for a man or a white person. Similar effects also appear to occur when a person observes another person from a

group A group is a number of persons or things that are located, gathered, or classed together. Groups of people * Cultural group, a group whose members share the same cultural identity * Ethnic group, a group whose members share the same ethnic iden ...

they identify with making an egalitarian decision. Self-licensing can have negative societal consequences since it has a permissive effect on behaviors such as

racial prejudice Racism is the belief that groups of humans possess different behavioral traits corresponding to inherited attributes and can be divided based on the superiority of one race or ethnicity over another. It may also mean prejudice, discrimination ...

and discrimination, selfishness, poor dietary and health habits, and excessive energy consumption. But recent scholarship has failed to replicate seminal studies of the licensing effect, and meta-analysis found it to be exaggerated by publication bias. Furthermore, where licensing typically assumes that a good deed is the cause that makes subsequent transgressions more likely, an alternative (or additional) account is that people are faced with a temptation to do something morally dubious, and use a prior good deed as an excuse or reason why it is allowed for them to indulge.

Definitions

Researchers Uzma Khan and Ravi Dhar describe the phenomena as follows: Similarly, Anna Merritt and colleagues have explained that

Group membership

It has been found that moral credentials can be obtained vicariously. That is, a person will behave as if they, themselves, have moral credentials, when that person observes another person from a group they identify with making an egalitarian decision. In research that draws on

social identity theory Social identity is the portion of an individual's self-concept derived from perceived membership in a relevant social group. As originally formulated by social psychologists Henri Tajfel and John Turner in the 1970s and the 1980s, social id ...

, it was also found that group membership moderates the effectiveness of moral credentials in mitigating perceptions of prejudice. Specifically, it was observed that displays of moral credentials have more effect between people who share

in-group In social psychology and sociology, an in-group is a social group to which a person psychologically identifies as being a member. By contrast, an out-group is a social group with which an individual does not identify. People may for example ...

status.

Examples

Research suggests that self-licensing affects moral self-regulation and individual behavior in a variety of contexts; for example, it can influence consumer purchases, political opinions, charitable giving, energy policy and home energy use, job hiring, racial attitudes, health-related decision-making,

risky sexual behavior Risky sexual behavior is the description of the activity that will increase the probability that a person engaging in sexual activity with another person infected with a sexually transmitted infection will be Pathogen transmission, infected, beco ...

, alcohol consumption, and

dietary supplement A dietary supplement is a manufactured product intended to supplement a person's diet by taking a pill (pharmacy), pill, capsule (pharmacy), capsule, tablet (pharmacy), tablet, powder, or liquid. A supplement can provide nutrients eithe ...

use.Executive summary
Cites . Cites . ''

Washington Post ''The Washington Post'', locally known as ''The'' ''Post'' and, informally, ''WaPo'' or ''WP'', is an American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C., the national capital. It is the most widely circulated newspaper in the Washington m ...

'' staff writer Michael Rosenwald described the following everyday examples of self-licensing behavior: In a large experience sampling study, Hofmann and colleagues found evidence for moral licensing in people's everyday behavior outside of the lab, noting that "committing a moral act earlier in the day was associated with an above-average likelihood of a subsequent immoral act and a decreased likelihood of a subsequent moral act."

Dietary supplement use and unhealthy behavior

A 2011 study published by researchers in Taiwan indicated that people who take

multivitamin A multivitamin is a preparation intended to serve as a dietary supplement with vitamins, dietary minerals, and other nutritional elements. Such preparations are available in the form of tablets, capsules, pastilles, powders, liquids, gummies, o ...

pills, especially those who believe that they are receiving significant health benefits from supplement use, are more prone to subsequently engage in unhealthy activities. Participants in the study were divided into two groups, both of which were given

placebo A placebo ( ) can be roughly defined as a sham medical treatment. Common placebos include inert tablets (like sugar pills), inert injections (like saline), sham surgery, and other procedures. Placebos are used in randomized clinical trials ...

pills; one group was correctly informed that the pills contained no active ingredients and the other group was told that the pills were multivitamin supplements. Survey results showed that participants who thought that they had received a multivitamin were predisposed to smoking more cigarettes and more likely to believe that they were invulnerable to harm, injury, and disease as compared with subjects who knew that they were given a placebo. Participants who believed they were given a multivitamin were also less likely to exercise and to choose healthier food, and had a higher desire to engage in "hedonic activities that involve instant gratification but pose long-term health hazards", such as casual sex, sunbathing, wild parties, and excessive drinking. In the 'multivitamin' group, the more supplements a participant used, the less likely they were to exercise, and smoking was highest among participants who expressed a conscious belief that multivitamins increased health. The study's authors argued that because dietary supplements are perceived as conferring health advantages, use of such supplements may create an illusory sense of invulnerability that disinhibits unhealthy behaviors. Overall, the study shows that people who take supplements may feel that merely taking a pill is a sufficient contribution to healthy living to enjoy other activities without regard to health, and it exposes a potential hypocrisy among supplement users. The authors advised: Commenting on the implications of the study,

Ben Goldacre Ben Michael Goldacre (born 20 May 1974) is a British physician, academic and science writer. He is the first Bennett Professor of Evidence-Based Medicine and director of the Bennett Institute for Applied Data Science at the University of Oxford ...

said this:

Consumer purchasing decisions

Researchers Khan and Dhar investigated the influence of self-licensing on consumer decisions regarding the purchase of

luxury goods In economics, a luxury good (or upmarket good) is a good (economics), good for which demand (economics), demand increases more than what is proportional as income rises, so that expenditures on the good become a more significant proportion of ove ...

. They reasoned that "relative preferences for a luxury option will be higher if people's prior decisions provide a boost to their relevant self-concept". Due to the self-licensing effect, "a prior intent to be virtuous boosts respondents' self-concepts, thus reducing negative self-attributions associated with the purchase of relative luxuries". Furthermore, they predicted that consumers may be unaware of how their prior decision influences their subsequent choices; i.e. the process underlying the licensing effect may be largely nonconscious. In the study, some participants were first asked to select from a list a charity organizations for which they would willingly volunteer three hours a week. Later, these people—and participants who hadn't been asked to volunteer—were asked whether they would buy designer jeans or an identically priced vacuum cleaner, assuming that they had enough money to buy only one. Participants who were asked to imagine having committed the charitable act before shopping were more than twice as likely to choose the jeans. The authors noted that "People don't even have to do good for this effect to happen... Even if they plan to do something good, it will give them a boost in their self-image. Any type of situation where you have guilt involved, you will see this, and so this happens in luxury goods." A study by University of Toronto behavioral marketing professor Nina Mazar and Chen-Bo Zhong found that people who bought green products were more likely to cheat and steal than those who bought conventional products. The researchers conducted an experiment in which they asked college students to shop for products online from either an

eco-friendly Environment friendly processes, or environmental-friendly processes (also referred to as eco-friendly, nature-friendly, and green), are sustainability and marketing terms referring to goods and services, laws, guidelines and policies that c ...

or a conventional store. Each subject was then asked to divide a small sum of money between themselves and a stranger in a paradigm known as the

dictator game In social psychology and economics, the dictator game is a popular experimental instrument a derivative of the ultimatum game. It involves a single decision by the "dictator" player: given an amount of money, how much to keep and how much to send ...

, in which participants can cheat to make more money. The shoppers from the green store were more dishonest than those at the conventional store, which brought them higher earnings in the game. The authors suggested that the results could be accounted for by the licensing effect, noting that "When we engage in a good deed, that gives us a kind of satisfaction. With that self-satisfied feeling can come tacit permission to behave more selfishly next time we have the opportunity". The authors added that "purchasing green products may license indulgence in self-interested and unethical behaviors", and concluded: However, subsequent research not only failed to replicate Mazar & Zhong's findings, but found that green consumption had no subsequent licensing effect on dishonesty.

Energy use

Researchers have invoked the self-licensing effect to explain why consumers who opt for energy-efficient products increase their energy usage so as to offset any potential gains. Energy economist Lucas Davis published a study showing that after getting high-efficiency washers, consumers increased clothes washing by nearly 6 percent. Other studies have shown that people leave energy-efficient lights on longer than conventional lights, and that many people who make their homes more energy efficient turn their heating up and ultimately see no reduction in energy costs.

Political opinions and racial preference

The self-licensing effect was examined by Monin and Miller in a 2001 study which demonstrated that when Princeton undergraduates established "non-prejudiced" credentials, they were more willing to express "prejudiced-sounding" opinions to an audience—even knowing the audience was unaware of their credentials. Subsequent research by Monin and Daniel Effron, using subjects paid in candy or cash and excluding those who preferred Republican presidential candidates in the 2004 or 2008 election, showed that the opportunity to endorse

Barack Obama Barack Hussein Obama II (born August 4, 1961) is an American politician who was the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, he was the first African American president in American history. O ...

during the 2008 presidential election made those who did so more likely to express preferences favoring whites over blacks in hypothetical situations, such as hiring a police chief for a department experiencing racial tension. However, Monin and Effron cautioned that their "experimental tasks left ambiguous the extent to which these preferences represented prejudice." Cites .

Meta-analyses and replications

Three

meta-analyses Meta-analysis is a method of synthesis of quantitative data from multiple independent studies addressing a common research question. An important part of this method involves computing a combined effect size across all of the studies. As such, th ...

have been published on self-licensing. Two of these meta-analyses suggest that the self-licensing effect might be moderated by culture, and the most recent of these meta-analyses suggest that previous estimates of the effect may be exaggerated due to

publication bias In published academic research, publication bias occurs when the outcome of an experiment or research study biases the decision to publish or otherwise distribute it. Publishing only results that show a Statistical significance, significant find ...

(consistent with recent publication of failures to replicate the original finding).