I've read the study itself. First of all, the study doesn't say that people who consider themselves "green" or support environmental causes in general are less ethical than people who do not. The actual study *assigned* people to either purchase green products or conventional products, then afterwards assessed the ethics of both groups. Note that the test subjects did not choose whether to purchase green products or conventional ones.
The correlation, they think, points to the notion that when one does something "ethical," in the sense of doing something to benefit the community at large, this acts as a kind or moral palliative, which then causes people to feel that they can behave unethically in other circumstances. The first point should be an obvious one - that the conclusion is not in any way limited to buying "green" products. That is merely the example used in the study. It could be any sort of behavior that people have convinced themselves is "ethical" behavior. This notion that people operate on a sort of moral "chit system" is pretty obvious. We drink diet soda then eat an entire pizza. We give a quarter to the homeless guy then embezzle money from our boss. The entire point is so hopelessly overbroad (not to mention overly obvious) and has so little do with whether "green" thinking and "green" behavior are, on the whole, beneficial to society, it is unclear why it is even a topic of discussion in this context.
So what is the real lesson of this study? That people better not do good things, or else they may have an increased chance of doing bad thing afterwards? But if people never do good things, then what happens? Oh wait.
I have a degree in pscyh and I had to learn a lot about studies that are done by pscyh researchers. I noticed the one area of pscyh that consistently produces "so what" results is social psychology, the area in which this particular study falls. I recall one study, for example, that has a researcher approaching strangers and asking for directions to some place they are purportedly trying to get to. In half the cases, the researcher steps on the person's foot "accidentally" before asking for help, and in the other, the researcher doesn't do that. Lo and behold, the people whose foot got stepped on where less likely to offer directions and help... The conclusion: that when you irritate/annoy/mild injury someone, they are less likely to be altruistic toward you. Presumably, funds were actually expended to achieve this profound bit of wisdom.
Not all psych research is that useless. Some of it can yield interesting data, but you've got to be careful about the methodology and in how you interpret whatever data you yield.
The Millgram study, for example, has been criticized on multiple grounds, one principle ground being the artificiality of the setting. Yet compare the Millgram study to this one: at least Stanely Millgram actually tricked his subjects into believing that they were inflicting real pain on real human beings. Not so here.
This entire study is a simulation that is totally transparent to its subjects. The purchasing of items is not a real purchasing of item and the subjects know it. Query how much of a moral palliative they experienced from buying simulated products with monopoly money. The money sharing was not a sharing of money. The stealing was a theft of fake digital money, not real money from real people. So what is the real conclusion here, that people who buy fake green commodities may feel that leads them to cheat in a fake simulation, that faux altruism justifies faux greed?
It's hard to say what it means, but it has nothing to do with the merits of environmentalism either as an ideology or as an actual behavior.
http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q...unbfcO&sig=AHIEtbSz_ZrZyHnQNXsKlWlyRYV4Fc6jpA
- wolf
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