Canadian Study Finds Hybrid Drivers More Prone to Lying, Cheating

A recent study carried out by Canadian psychologists Nina Mazar and Chen-Bo Zhong has discovered that green consumers are more likely to be social deviants.

Studying the environmentally conscious consumer, Mazar and Zhong (of the University of Toronto) found that “purchasing green products may produce the counterintuitive effect of licensing asocial and unethical behaviors by establishing moral credentials.” Through a complex series of tests, Mazar and Zhong found that subjects reacted in a prosocial manner when simply exposed to environmentally-friendly stimulus. However, when subjects acted upon that stimulus (buying a green product rather than simply seeing a green product), their behaviour worsened as their value-driven actions endowed them with moral credentials that licensed immoral behaviour.

This was further illustrated by the pair’s final test in which subjects were invited to purchase items at a conventional store or a “green” store before participating in a seemingly unrelated pattern identification process. A simple process, this exam granted subjects the ability to cheat on the exam in order to get paid more for their participation in the exam. Finally, participants were given the chance to steal even more money out of an envelope from which they were expected to extract their pay. The results? Green consumers cheated and stole a significant amount more than the conventional consumers.

Further information on the study can be found here: http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2010/03/01/0956797610363538.full