Moral self-licensing and social dilemmas: an experimental evidence from a taking game in Madagascar

In this paper, we address the question of how previous good deeds may license anti-social behavior such as legally taken from social common funds. We designed a two steps framed classroom experiment, with one control and three treatments. In the first step, the three treatments consist in a task that enables subjects to earn moral credit, whereas the control group just has a neutral task (i.e. unscrambling sentences). The three treatments differ in the framing of the "moral boosting" task. In the second step, subjects are given the possibility to take an amount from a fund allocated to their University. We show that participants in the license condition adopt higher anti-social behavior than participants in control. First, the number of participants who decide to take money from the University's fund increases under the license condition, and second, the average amount taken is statistically higher than in the control condition. The framing of the preceding task seems to have little impact on self-licensing. However, a low degree of implication encourages morally dubious behavior. Finally, we found that men adopt higher anti-social behavior than women. License effect exists both for men and women, even if the increase of anti-social behavior after a good deed is more pronounced for men.