‘Going green’ makes you more likely to steal and cheat
When Al Gore was caught running up huge energy bills at home at the same time as lecturing on the need to save electricity, it turns out that he was only reverting to “green” type.
According to a study, when people feel they have been morally virtuous by saving the planet through their purchases of organic baby food, for example, it leads to the “licensing [of] selfish and morally questionable behaviour”, otherwise known as “moral balancing” or “compensatory ethics”.
Do Green Products Make Us Better People is published in the latest edition of the journal Psychological Science. Its authors, Canadian psychologists Nina Mazar and Chen-Bo Zhong, argue that people who wear what they call the “halo of green consumerism” are less likely to be kind to others, and more likely to cheat and steal. “Virtuous acts can license subsequent asocial and unethical behaviours,” they write.
Full story: How going green may make you mean | Environment | The Guardian
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Coming to a financial center near you soon:
A new Moral Equivalency Exchange. You too can buy and sell your corruption offsets. If you get a little too much sunshine trying to disinfect your bad behavior with transparency and exposure – just promise to recycle your political rhetoric and sell your credits.
This may suffer a delay as the chief supporter of this “slap & tickle” tax, Rep Massa – recently resigned his seat.
Such is the Green Man’s Burden.
Well, this certainly explains the fraudulent, criminal behavior of Blankfein, Goldman’s CEO. Not only did he believe he was ‘Doing ‘god’s’ work, but since he planted a bush in his own honor in Tel Aviv’s main square, he probably also thought of himself as ‘Green’.
that doesn’t really make any sense, what you said there.
How’s the cancer? You doing ok, pal?
Could not agree with you more – just look at all those morally virtuous right wing christians.
So many cheating on their spouses, as many strip joints as churches in the mid-lands, preachers caught with the hand in the till, evading taxes or snorting cocaine of the buttocks of male prostitutes.
Moral balancing needs the perception of doing something morale, before people do something selfish has been known about for a very long time. Papal indulgences anyone? The whole of Islamic thought?
From the last lines of the article
Dieter Frey, a social psychologist at the University of Munich, said the findings fitted patterns of human behaviour. “At the moment in which you have proven your credentials in a particular area, you tend to allow yourself to stray elsewhere,” he said.
This is a non story, unless you have not figured out by now, that most people are selfish.