Ever wondered whether there’s more than meets the eye to those green vegetables at your local supermarket? A recent study by Nina Mazar and Chen-Bo Zhong of the Rotman School of Management shows that green products are tightly linked to ethical and social behaviours. Mazar and Zhong’s research shows that purchasing food products goes beyond just price and quality preferences.
According to Mazar, “Our daily actions need to be viewed in a bigger context. Previous decisions and actions can affect subsequent decisions and actions.”
The study uses theories of behavioural priming for the bulk of the research. Behavioural priming is based on the principle that showing a subject a stimulus in the environment will affect subsequent behaviour, even if this effect is unconscious. For instance, other researchers have demonstrated that seeing the Apple logo enhances creativity.
Mazar and Zhong suggest that, since green products are associated with environmental, humanitarian, and ethical considerations, exposure to green products should influence superior levels of conduct.
Mazar and Zhong performed three experiments to test the influence of green products on behaviour. In the first experiment, participants were asked to rate people who purchased organic foods, versus those who purchased conventional foods.
As expected, the people who purchased organic food were rated higher in altruistic behaviour and cooperativity than those who had purchased conventional products.
Although Mazar and Zhong predicted that being merely exposed to green products would increase altruistic conduct, on the basis of recent theories of moral regulation, they also predicted that actually purchasing green products would reduce subsequent altruism, due to the establishment of moral credentials. In other words, if you’ve done your good deed for the day, you’re allowed to deviate from squeaky clean actions for a bit.
The second experiment showed that participants who were merely exposed to a green store shared more money than those exposed to a conventional store. However, participants who actually purchased products in the green store shared less money than those in the conventional store. Therefore, exposure to green products increases cooperative behaviour with others, while acting according to one’s values — in this case, purchasing green products — establishes the moral credentials needed to later engage in deviant behaviour.
In the third experiment, Mazar and Zhong tested whether purchasing green products would increase the tendency for participants to lie. First, participants were asked to make purchases in either the conventional or green product store. Then they completed a visual perception task, in which they were asked to indicate which side of a computer screen contained a larger number dots when these dots flashed briefly on the screen. This was easy to identify, because there were always substantially more dots on one side than the other.
The first round of the task did not involve money, but subsequent rounds included payment for correct answers. The results showed that those who purchased in the green store tended to lie in order to earn more money. These participants earned on average $0.36 more than those in the conventional store.
“This paper is another demonstration of the licensing effect, and suggests that if people view the purchase of green products as a moral behavior rather than the norm without any moral association, the act of purchasing green products has the potential to boost our moral self-image, and thus, subsequently license more selfish actions,” says Mazar. These three experiments provide key evidence to suggest that consumption is more tightly connected to our social and moral self than previously thought.
According to Mazar, “Our findings suggest that in order to achieve long-term societal welfare effects, we need to study actions and behaviors in their larger context, and observe whether they might have any counter-[productive] effects further down the road.”
