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GLOBE-Net (December 14, 2009) - Consumer choices not only reflect price and quality preferences but also social and moral values as witnessed in the remarkable growth of the global market for organic and environmentally friendly products.

Building on recent research on behavioral priming and moral regulation, researchers at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management found that mere exposure to green products and the purchase of them lead to markedly different behavioral consequences.

In line with the halo associated with green consumerism, people act more altruistically after mere exposure to green than conventional products. However, people act less altruistically and are more likely to cheat and steal after purchasing green products as opposed to conventional products.

Together, the studies show that consumption is more tightly connected to our social and ethical behaviors in directions and domains other than previously thought.

In the past few decades consumers have become increasingly attentive to social and ethical considerations such as energy consumption, animal husbandry, and fair trading . This increased concern and feeling of responsibility for society has led to remarkable growth in the global market for environment-friendly products.

At the heart of this trend, which is often referred to as ethical consumerism or green consumption, lies the assumption that purchasing choices not only express price and quality preferences but also norms, values, and beliefs. This assumption has motivated a stream of research focusing on identifying the "green consumer" by socio-demographic variables, personality measures, or values that are directly related to environmental consciousness.

Researchers Nina Mazar and Chen-Bo Zhong, inspired by a shared interest in green living and an appreciation of how the human mind can justify bad behavior, found that people who are simply exposed to green products behave more altruistically than people who purchase the products.

What has not been sufficiently understood is how green consumption fits into the global sense of social responsibility and morality and affects behaviors outside of the consumption domain.

Based on recent theories in behavioral priming and moral regulation, the researchers argue that mere exposure to green products versus purchasing them will have markedly different effects on subsequent behaviors.

While mere exposure can activate concepts related to social responsibility and ethical conduct and induce corresponding behaviors, purchasing green products may produce the counterintuitive effect of licensing asocial and unethical behaviors by establishing moral credentials.

Thus, green products do not necessarily make us better people.

A large literature on priming has found that social behaviors can be primed by subtle environmental cues. For example, exposure to exclusive restaurant-pictures can improve manners in a subsequent eating task. Similarly, priming "loyalty" through a benign verbal task can increase in-group favoritism and identification. These results are often interpreted as an activation of norms and goals associated with environmental cues that solicit consistent behaviors. Recent research in the field of consumer behavior has demonstrated similar effects.

Given that green products are manifestations of higher ethical standards and humanitarian considerations, one might expect that mere exposure to green products will activate norms of social responsibility and ethical conduct and increase corresponding behaviors.

Unlike early studies that tend to examine individuals' moral reasoning and reactions to isolated events, recent developments in moral psychology emphasize the importance of a global sense of morality. These theories suggest that our moral behaviors are figured into an implicit calculation of self-perception where virtuous behaviors boost moral self-image while transgressions dampen it.

Although people prefer to have a positive moral self, maintaining it often comes at a cost because social and ethical dilemmas usually involve conflicts of interest. Thus, people tend to be strongly motivated to engage in pro-social and ethical behaviors if their moral self is threatened by a recent transgression; they are least likely to scrutinize moral implications and regulate their behaviors right after their moral self experienced a boost from a good deed. This implies that virtuous acts can license subsequent asocial and unethical behaviors.

People do not make decisions in a vacuum; their decisions are embedded in a history of behaviors. Across three studies we consider pro-social and ethical decision-making in the context of past consumer behaviors and demonstrate that the halo associated with green consumerism has to be taken with reservations. 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.

The research findings extend previous research on priming and licensing in two important ways. First, they explore the relationship between priming as "mere exposure" and other more deliberative processes. Specific to the case of green products, people can be primed by green products in many occasions, for example, while watching a green product advertisement, walking by an organic store, or actually purchasing green products.

Do all of these encounters have the same effect? By explicitly contrasting mere exposure with purchasing, the researchers explored the compex interaction between two possible processes (priming and licensing). The findings suggest that not all exposures have the same priming effect and that other processes (i.e. licensing) can negate or even substitute the priming effect.

In previous research moral credentials and the behaviors they licensed were typically in the same domain. The studies suggest that social and ethical acts may contribute to a more general sense of moral self than previously thought, licensing socially undesirable behaviors in distant domains.

So as you dive into your holiday shopping, be careful of the patrons coming out of Whole Foods, because as this study suggests, you might just find yourself missing your wallet.

Check out this article on GLOBE-Net (http://www.globe-net.com/articles/2009/december/12/do-green-products-mak...)