Do good deeds make bad people?

Clot, S. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4964-825X, Grolleau, G. and Ibanez, L. (2016) Do good deeds make bad people? European Journal of Law and Economics, 42 (3). pp. 491-513. ISSN 0929-1261 doi: 10.1007/s10657-014-9441-4

Abstract/Summary

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.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/47428
Item Type	Article
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Arts, Humanities and Social Science > School of Politics, Economics and International Relations > Economics
Publisher	Springer
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