{"id":21589,"date":"2010-03-16T11:26:29","date_gmt":"2010-03-16T16:26:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thedetroitbureau.com\/?p=21589"},"modified":"2010-03-16T23:57:53","modified_gmt":"2010-03-17T04:57:53","slug":"green-is-mean-and-unethical","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thedetroitbureau.com\/2010\/03\/green-is-mean-and-unethical\/","title":{"rendered":"Green is Mean – and Really Unethical?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Does driving a high-mileage hybrid encourage motorists to develop "compensatory ethics"?<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Ask any California motorist and they\u2019ll tell you about the folks in the Prius hybrids.\u00a0 For several years, the high-mileage vehicles qualified for special stickers that let them drive in the car pool lanes on local highways, even with just one person onboard.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd you\u2019d seem to find most of them driving well below the speed limit,\u201d grumps Bill Tabor, an Orange County mid-level manager, who had to squeeze several colleagues into his low-mileage Honda Accord to get the same access.\u00a0 \u201cIt was as if they suddenly were the authority, setting the speed that everyone else would have to drive.\u201d<\/p>\n

Frustrating, no question.\u00a0 But according to a new study, it\u2019s also no surprise.<\/p>\n

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Free Subscription! Click Here!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

People who wear the \u201chalo of green consumerism\u201d may like to be seen as saving the planet, but they\u2019re less likely to be kind to others and surprisingly likely to cheat and steal, according to a study by the Canadian psychologists Nina Mazar and Chen-Bo Zhong, who published their findings in the journal Psychological Science, under the title, \u201cDo Green Products Make Us Better People?\u201d<\/p>\n

Apparently, the answer is not also a resounding no.<\/p>\n

\u201cVirtuous acts can license subsequent asocial and unethical behaviors,\u201d Mazar and Zhong contend.<\/p>\n

They back that finding up with the results of a series of tests.\u00a0 In one, green consumers were more likely than other, less environmentally-focused consumers to cheat in a computer game to get more money \u2013 and then lie about it.\u00a0 In fact, in another test in which participants were put on the honor system and asked to take money from an envelope to pay themselves for purchases, the study team found greenies were six times more likely to steal.<\/p>\n

\u201cGreen products do not necessarily make for better people,\u201d the report in Psychological Science declares.<\/p>\n

The degree to which the environmentally-minded consumers proved to have otherwise low scruples surprised the pair.<\/p>\n

\u201cGiven that green products are manifestations of high ethical standards and humanitarian considerations,\u201d the authors wrote, it would otherwise seem that this would \u201cactivate norms of social responsibility and ethical conduct.\u201d\u00a0 But, instead, their findings seem to suggest that greenies just might see themselves as above the typical norms of behavior.<\/p>\n

The authors call that \u201ccompensatory ethics,\u201d or \u201cmoral balancing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Perhaps that explains why some of the most visible environmental proponents often find themselves caught in compromising situations, like Al Gore, the former Vice President and activist for preventing global warming, whose own home has turned out to use more energy than some small villages.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ask any California motorist and they\u2019ll tell you about the folks in the Prius hybrids.\u00a0 For several years, the high-mileage vehicles qualified for special stickers that let them drive in the car pool lanes on local highways, even with just one person onboard. \u201cAnd you\u2019d seem to find most of them driving well below the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":17013,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"make":[],"post-state":[],"category_old":[151],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thedetroitbureau.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21589"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thedetroitbureau.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thedetroitbureau.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedetroitbureau.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedetroitbureau.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21589"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thedetroitbureau.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21589\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedetroitbureau.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17013"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thedetroitbureau.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21589"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedetroitbureau.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21589"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedetroitbureau.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21589"},{"taxonomy":"make","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedetroitbureau.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/make?post=21589"},{"taxonomy":"post-state","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedetroitbureau.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/post-state?post=21589"},{"taxonomy":"category_old","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedetroitbureau.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/category_old?post=21589"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}