... and by "greenies," I mean green consumers, not leprechauns.
That's what two assistant professors at the University of Toronto suggest based on their experiments with students. I'm not so sure.
You can read the details in this post from Green Inc., but here's the gist: a group of students instructed in one phase of an experiment to purchase goods from an eco-themed website was less likely to be generous and more likely to cheat and steal in subsequent phases than a second group of students told to shop on a conventional online store.
Meanwhile, students who were asked merely to rate green products were more generous than their conventional counterparts.
To summarize the Canadian researchers' conclusions, being exposed to green products makes
you more altruistic, but actually putting your money where your mouth
is may turn you into a stingy pilferer. Or, as the Guardian put it, "People who wear ... the 'halo of green consumerism' are less
likely to be kind to others, and more likely to cheat and steal."
My first reaction to this story was, I don't buy it. For one thing, the subjects in the experiment who bought green products didn't necessarily identify as ethical consumers; they were simply students told to buy stuff from a green website. How about some data on "real" socially conscious shoppers—including non-student ones?
However, maybe leaving self-identified greenies out of the experiment was part of its point. After all, "green-ness" is a continuum, and hard-core conscious consumers—people who have embraced environmentalism on numerous levels of their lives—still represent a minority of all shoppers. Given that, it's useful to see how "average" consumers behave when confronted with the multitude of eco-friendlier products currently bombarding the marketplace.
Also, I have to admit that the researchers' contention that "virtuous acts can license subsequent asocial and unethical behaviours" (quoted in the Guardian)—so-called moral balancing or compensatory ethics—does ring true to me.
But that doesn't mean our new strategy to save the world is to stop buying from companies that do the right thing.
What do you think? Please leave a comment below.
In the meantime, I'm off to go pick some pockets!
[Creative Commons-licensed photo by Flickr users Herbrm, top, and steev-o.]