The Psychology Behind Good People Doing Bad Things
Why people can be hypocrites when it comes to morality.
In 1891, Oscar Wilde had imparted a particular piece of wisdom in his article “The Soul of Man Under Socialism.” He wrote that:
“Charity creates a multitude of sins.”
By that logic, we can imagine he wouldn’t be surprised or shocked at all if he heard about various scandals — or truths about people — over the years such as:
- A catholic church sexually abusing children.
- Cancer charities scamming donators by taking those donations to line the owner’s pockets.
- “Saint” Teresa and her checkered past of being cozy with dictators, offering poor medical care and believing poor people should suffer instead of be saved.
The list goes on and on and there is a clear pattern that can be seen: Anyone doing some extraordinary and good things seems to be doing a lot of bad in private. But the question here is why do this? Why do people who do or present themselves as morally good feel the compulsion to do something bad?
Well, moral licensing can possibly explain that: When humans are doing something good, this theory dictates that this act of kindness gives us a license to do something bad.
The Moral Low Ground
This theory doesn’t apply to the famous and well known people over the years. Every person is like this as one paper establishes that. It was conducted by economists at the University of Chicago and they found that when working for a socially responsible company, employees felt more inclined to do immoral things.
In one experiment, they hired people to transcribe images of short German texts and paid them upfront 10 percent for the job. The 90 percent would be delivered after the transcriptions were done OR if the transcriber said the documents were too illegible to transcribe.
When the workers were told that, they were further instructed that 5 percent of their wages would be sent to Unicef’s education program (while 25 percent in instances of cheating).
What this scenario created was a few people cheating — that is not completing the job and taking their 10 percent fee and running — while more stated the documents were too illegible to transcribe — getting paid in full.
According to the research:
“The share of cheaters [was] highest when we frame corporate social responsibility as a prosocial act on behalf of workers.”
In other words, whenever a worker felt a greater sense of their own actions would lead to charitable donations, they felt it was justified to steal from their employer rather than to give to charity.
Though There Is Ambiguity To This
The catch with moral licensing is that it can’t explain every morally bad thing. Sure from this test, you can see transcribers cheating in order to give more money to charities. It’s not so different from male-only dinners hiring women to make events more appealing — or by extension fast food and dining places, in general, leaning more towards hiring women to serve guests.
But this test can’t really explain instances of things like sexual assault or abuse. The thing with moral licensing is that it only applies when bad behaviour can be rationalized as something good. Things like thieves stealing or robbing a bank because they’re starving or are looking after a sick family member.
Another example of this is a 2011 study conducted by the University of Oklahoma. Researchers asked students to complete some mental math tests on a computer. The test was simple as it only involved numbers one through 20.
Before taking the test though, they were told one important thing about the test: you need to press the spacebar to bring up the response box within a specific time. If you failed to do this, the answer would automatically appear. Apparently, it’s just a bug in the program itself which is still in the piloting phase.
The students were then put into two groups where one group was told you had 10 seconds to press the spacebar, while another was asked to press within 1 second. There was also a working assumption that students who failed to press the spacebar within 10 seconds were deliberately cheating.
However, the ones who had 1 second could rationalize their failure as incidental rather than immoral. It’s just a bug in the program.
Once the test was done, the students were asked how many times they failed to press the spacebar fast enough, thereby revealing the answer. There was way more lying that occurred in the 1-second group compared to the 10-second group.
Also There Are Two Kinds Of Moral Licensing
To add more complexity, there are some who argue that moral licensing can’t just be chalked up to prosocial or rationalized thoughts. According to Daniel Efforn, of the London Business School, he believes there are two kinds:
- Moral credentials mechanism — where it leans towards rationalization. “I did a good thing so that allows me to act ambiguously because as a good person I know my behaviour will be most likely viewed as good rather than bad.”
- Moral credits mechanism — where morality is treated like a bank account. “Every time I do bad things, that’s a withdrawal from the account. Bad deeds don’t have to be rationalized though and I can deposit more into the account with good deeds.”
What that second type of moral licensing does is explain some of the behaviour above from people like Mother Theresa, cancer charities, and churches. By no means can their past slights be excused, but to them, they’ve put in enough “moral credits” so they feel justified in doing something bad or acting on a bad viewpoint.
This theory can’t determine or predict whether something good can result in something bad. However, it does explain at times why people that we view as good can sometimes act in bad ways.
And the thing about this as I kind of hinted at is this doesn’t apply exclusively to the charity industry. Every person is like this and we can easily make moral mountains out of molehills of virtue. Study after study has revealed that even buying from environmentally friendly companies can lead to us being justified to act badly.
In fact, in sectors where there is meant to be good — like religion, charity, and even self-improvement — people can feel more justified in using their moral license to do bad things.
Of course, people are going to do things that people don’t always agree with. The thing with morality is everyone has their own versions of what’s good and what is bad. There are some things we can all agree on — like rape, theft, and abuse — are objectively bad. However, this phenomenon shows that not everything is so simple.
Beyond that, everyone seems to have a timer for when they feel justified to do something bad. It might be small and insignificant in the grand scheme of things, or it can affect way more people than usual. Whatever the case may be, it might be boiled down to us paying more attention to it and seeing when we rationalize bad behaviour and to stop ourselves.
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