Psychological license: When it is needed and how it functions.

By Dale T. Miller, Daniel A. Effron. 2010

361 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ad52ea83d20fda4292dd621e28388de6f478c1e3

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Citations in the corpus

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).”
Feel good, stay green: Positive affect promotes pro-environmental behaviors and mitigates compensatory “mental bookkeeping” effects (2018, neutral): “Empirical evidence supports the notion that performing an initial PEB can reduce willingness to engage in subsequent PEBs (Miller & Effron, 2010; Sachdeva et al., 2009).”
Home and away: cross-contextual consistency in tourists’ pro-environmental behavior (2020, background): “…they are no longer obligated to engage in any other pro-environmental behaviors (Blanken et al., 2015; Kl € ockner et al., 2013; Merritt et al., 2010; Miller & Effron, 2010; Thøgersen & Olander, 2003) or that they are “ licensed ” to engage in environmentally harmful behaviors (Tiefenbeck et al.,…”
Moralized Leadership: The Construction and Consequences of Ethical Leader Perceptions (2015, background): “Thus, individuals try to act in ways that reflect their moral standards and try to compensate when they fall short of these standards (Miller & Effron, 2010).”
Sustainability of the sharing economy in question: When second-hand peer-to-peer platforms stimulate indulgent consumption (2017, background): “To defend this assumption, we draw on the emerging self-licensing theory (DeWitt Huberts et al., 2012; Khan and Dhar, 2006; Merritt et al., 2010; Miller and Effron, 2010; Mukhopadhyay and Johar, 2009) stating that certain decision contexts lead to indulgent decisions as they offer a justification…”
How coworkers attribute, react to, and shape job crafting (2019, background): “Additionally, it could be interesting to examine whether job crafters think they sometimes “deserve” to act in a selfish way based on earlier accrued credits (i.e., moral licensing; Miller & Effron, 2010) and therefore feel entitled to engage in crafting that might negatively impact coworkers.”
Approach, Ability, Aftermath: A Psychological Process Framework of Unethical Behavior at Work (2015, background): “Rest’s rationalism also assumes a stability about human behavior questioned by recent research in moral psychology (Miller & Effron, 2010; Monin & Jordan, 2009).”
Paying to Be Nice: Consistency and Costly Prosocial Behavior (2011, neutral): “Published online in Articles in Advance November 4, 2011.”
For better or for worse? Empirical evidence of moral licensing in a behavioral energy conservation campaign (2013, background): “Theory on moral licensing that has been developed in other behavioral domains could help to address this issue, for example by making environmental behaviors more important to individuals’ identity, framing campaigns with respect to goal commitment instead of progress, or making hypocrisy visible (D”
The strategic pursuit of moral credentials (2012, background): “This research represents an important extension to work on moral licensing, which has shown that people are more likely to act in morally ambiguous ways when they have previously established their morality (Merritt et al., 2010; Miller & Effron, 2010).”