Moral licenses: Strong experimental evidence

Research on moral cleansing and moral self-licensing provides a framework to explain the dynamics of moral behavior. Bad deeds trigger negative feelings that make people more likely to engage in moral behavior to offset them. Good deeds favor a positive self-perception that creates licensing effects that make people to engage in behaviors that are less likely to be moral. In short, a deviation from a “normal state of being” is balanced with a subsequent action that compensates the prior behavior. This paper reports experimental evidence that give support to the idea that actions are affected by past actions. To explore this phenomenon we run an economic experiment where subjects play a sequence of giving decisions (dictator games). The amount of money he/she kept in every round in analyzed using an estimation technique to accurately measure the dynamics of these actions. We find that past donations (only the previous one) affect actual decisions but the sign is negative; subjects change in every round what they did in the past (generous- selfish - generous). Hence donations over time are the result of a systematic process of equalization moral licensing (being selfish after altruist) or cleansing (altruistic after selfish).