Moral Credential Effect

The moral credential effect, also called moral licensing or self-licensing, is the tendency for a person who has recently taken an action that bolsters their own positive self-image, particularly a moral or virtuous action, to feel subsequently less concerned about behaving in a way that would otherwise seem selfish, prejudiced, or unethical, because the earlier good act has effectively earned them a credential that licenses the later lapse. The psychologists Benoit Monin and Dale Miller documented the foundational version of the effect in a landmark 2001 study, in which Princeton undergraduates who had first established a credential of being non-prejudiced, by disagreeing with blatantly sexist or racist statements, went on to express more prejudiced opinions afterward than participants who had not first established that credential. Subsequent research has documented the same underlying pattern across many other domains: shoppers who purchased products at a store branded as environmentally friendly were subsequently found to cheat more in an unrelated financial game than shoppers at a conventional store, and people who imagined themselves volunteering for a charitable cause were about twice as likely to choose a luxury item over a more practical one in a later, unrelated purchasing decision, compared with people who had not first imagined volunteering. More recent meta-analyses of the moral licensing literature have raised concerns that some of the earlier reported effect sizes may have been inflated by publication bias, and that a number of attempts to replicate the original seminal findings have failed, making the size and consistency of the effect an active subject of ongoing research.