Moral Self-Licensing: When Being Good Frees Us to Be Bad

By Anna C. Merritt, Daniel A. Effron, Benoît Monin. 2010

933 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Information Systems and Management, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2c8abec7175d85f81f9275c98f2d96dece708534

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Citations in the corpus

Household energy use: Applying behavioural economics to understand consumer decision-making and behaviour (2015, background): “, showing loss of motivation, overjustification, moral licensing effects; see [84–87]), particularly if intrinsic motivation for the target behaviour is already high.”
Ethically adrift: How others pull our moral compass from true North, and how we can fix it (2013, background): “…phenomenon of using prior moral actions as a credential or license to commit later unethical actions and prior unethical actions as a motivation to engage in later ethical ones (for reviews, see Merritt et al., 2010; Miller & Effron, 2010; Monin & Jordan, 2009; Zhong, Ku, Lount, & Murnighan, 2010).”
Cross-Domain Effects of Guilt on Desire for Self-Improvement Products (2015, background): “We emphasize that the observed effects are driven by a self-motivated process (e.g., Sedikides 1999), rather than by some cognitive association between guilt and a desire for any “good” option available (e.g., Merritt, Effron, and Monin 2010).”
Excusing Selfishness in Charitable Giving (2015, neutral): “Section 4.4 conﬁrms the robustness of the results in the partner study.”
From plastic bottle recycling to policy support: An experimental test of pro-environmental spillover (2016, background): “They feel they have already done their part and are said to be “resting on their laurels” or maintaining a moral balance sheet (Merritt et al., 2010; Thøgersen & Crompton, 2009).”