Do good deeds make bad people?

Sophie Clot (), Gilles Grolleau () and Lisette Ibanez
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Sophie Clot: ENSAM

European Journal of Law and Economics, 2016, vol. 42, issue 3, No 5, 513 pages

Abstract: Abstract According to the so-called ‘self-licensing effect’, committing to a virtuous act in a preceding choice may lead to behave less virtuously in the succeeding decision. Consequently, well-intentioned policies can lead to overall counter-productive effects by licensing people to behave badly in related behaviors. On the other side, motivational crowding theory argues that constraining people to adopt a desirable behavior can backfire. We use of a classroom experiment to test whether a regulatory framework to incentivize individuals to adopt pro-environmental behavior generate similar spillovers in terms of licensing effect than a non-regulatory framework. We show that the way the good deed is caused doesn’t seem to influence the licensing effect. Nevertheless, we found that business- and environmental-orientated majors react adversely to the regulatory framework. We show that environmental-orientated students exhibit higher intrinsically motivations than business-orientated ones. Accordingly, we suggest that the licensing effect is more likely to arise when the preceding ‘virtuous’ act is freely chosen (respectively regulatory caused) for non-intrinsically (respectively intrinsically) motivated individuals.

Keywords: Environment; Regulation; Self-licensing; Voluntary approaches (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D03 D04 K32 Q50 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Do good deeds make bad people? (2016)
Working Paper: Do Good Deeds Make Bad People? (2011)
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DOI: 10.1007/s10657-014-9441-4

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