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Green Inc. Column

When ‘Green’ Consumers Decide,‘ I’ve Done Enough’

NEW YORK — Are consumers of “green” products more likely to be miserly and thieving? A series of psychological experiments at the University of Toronto — the results of which are scheduled for publication in an issue of the journal Psychological Science — seemed to suggest, at least in some contexts, just that.

The study is one of the latest entries in an expanding effort to understand the human disposition toward environmental issues, an area of inquiry that has gained new urgency among scientists, politicians and environmental advocates as popular agreement on the gravity of that über-environmental issue, climate change, continues to wane.

That is not to suggest that the Toronto researchers — two assistant professors, Nina Mazar and Chen-Bo Zhong — were investigating the climate issue. But their findings do seem to highlight the complexities involved in shaping popular opinion — and action — on issues that can seem hopelessly abstract, morally overwhelming and utterly far, far away.

Ms. Mazar and Mr. Zhong were investigating a particular tributary of human psychology that explores the ways exposure to certain ideals, as well as perceived adherence to them, can regulate behavior.

In an initial experiment, 59 student volunteers were asked to assign attributes like cooperative, altruistic, and ethical to two different groups of consumers: those who purchase environmentally friendly products and those who buy more conventional goods.

As expected, the consumers in the first group — those perceived to be making “green” choices in the market — were more likely to be assigned noble attributes than the nongreen shoppers.

But things got more interesting in the next two experiments.

In one subsequent exercise, 156 volunteers were placed in front of computers where they were exposed at random either to an online shop offering mostly eco-friendly products or to one offering mostly conventional goods.

Some shoppers in each group were asked to rate the products only on “aesthetics of design” and the “informativeness” of their description. The rest were invited to make purchases.

All participants were then asked to engage in a seemingly unrelated exercise that involved sharing money. The result? Those who had simply been exposed to the “green” store — that is, those who had merely rated the products — shared the most money.

Those who had purchased products at the green store were easily the least generous.

“Green products embody social considerations such that mere exposure to them increases subsequent pro-social behavior,” the authors explained. “However, acting upon one’s values establishes moral credentials that can subsequently license deviating behavior.”

In other words, those participants who perceived themselves as having already done their bit for the world by purchasing green products felt no particular obligation to be benevolent afterward.

Things got even worse in the final exercise, in which 90 students initially shopped in either the green store or the conventional store, as before. Afterward, they were presented with a computer visualization task in which they were told they could earn money by correctly identifying which side of a box, divided by a line, contained more dots — although the dots were, in practice, always arrayed as to make the answer quite obvious.

A tally of individual earnings was visible to each participant as they proceeded, but the computer was, in fact, programmed to provide payment regardless of whether the answer was right or wrong. That is to say, it simply recorded payment for making a keystroke.

The experiment was also designed so that this apparent system glitch would become quickly obvious to participants.

In the end, despite having been told that the results might be used to develop future studies and therefore accuracy was vital, the volunteers who had shopped at the green store were significantly more likely to have answered incorrectly. This suggested that a greater number of the green shoppers were simply plucking randomly at the keys to get more money rather than trying to be accurate.

When given the opportunity to pay themselves from cash-filled envelopes that participants had been given at the outset, the green shoppers were also more likely to pluck out a little more money than the tallies on their screens entitled them to.

“People do not make decisions in a vacuum,” the researchers concluded, adding that “while mere exposure to green products can have a positive societal effect by inducing pro-social and ethical acts, purchasing green products may license indulgence in self-interested and unethical behaviors.”

I chatted about these studies last week with my colleague Andrew C. Revkin, whose coverage of global warming for The New York Times over the past 15 years has exposed him both to the evolving science as well as to the ebb and flow of popular opinion on what should be done about it, and at what cost.

As I wrote at our Green Inc. blog last week, he was immediately reminded of another widely discussed psychological phenomenon known as the “single-action bias,” a term that arises often in discussions of climate change.

The Center for Research on Environmental Decisions at Columbia University in New York describes the single-action bias this way:

“In response to uncertain and risky situations, humans have a tendency to focus and simplify their decision making. Individuals responding to a threat are likely to rely on one action, even when it provides only incremental protection or risk reduction and may not be the most effective option. People often take no further action, presumably because the first one succeeded in reducing their feeling of worry or vulnerability. This phenomenon is called the single-action bias.”

For many citizens of the comparatively wealthy West, the question of climate change is often less a physical threat — at least in the near term — than a moral one. The worst and most immediate risks of a warming planet, after all, accrue to those living in poor, often coastal countries whose communities and livelihoods are more intimately tied to the whims and ravages of nature.

In the rich world, a common response to such a nebulous and faraway problem, however, is to make a minor adjustment and consider our jobs done. “Prompted by a distressing emotional signal,” wrote Jon Gertner in an article on environmental psychology in The New York Times Magazine last year, “we buy a more efficient furnace or insulate our attic or vote for a green candidate — a single action that effectively diminishes global warming as a motivating factor.”

The students in the University of Toronto experiments were not exposed to any perceived threat, of course, but it is possible that their willingness to curtail generosity and resort to thievery was motivated, in part, by having already completed a single, relatively minor action that, to their minds, benefited the world.

And that action, it seems, gave them subsequent license to quietly — and sometimes quite fraudulently — pursue their own private gains.

If that is the case, it is perhaps little wonder that neither the practical risks of climate change, nor the moral imperatives attending it, have done much — at least so far — to bring nations together on a solution.

A version of this article appears in print on   in The International Herald Tribune. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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