Moral Licensing and Cleansing Theory: A Study in Decision-Making, Morality and Interaction

Abstract

The role of morality in the decision-making and behaviour of individuals has a long research history across a wide range of disciplines, and has led to often- competing descriptions and definitions of morality itself. While religious belief has been at the core of some previous work, hedonic models of morality have also been used to explain behaviour and decisions. However, such models leave many common behavioural patterns unexplained, with the theories unable to readily reconcile the conflict between expected outcome and observed reality. One proposal that addresses these failures is moral licensing and cleansing theory, also known as moral self-licensing.

The theory of moral self-licensing, that individuals utilise an almost homeostatic mechanism to balance their internal moral state with either immoral or prosocial acts, has a strong research record in consumer behaviour fields. While a number of leading studies have more recently explored the theory from a psychological perspective, the body of literature covering this theory in the field of psychology remains limited. Over two experiments, this thesis sought to further explore how the theory may explain decisions in an array of situations more varied than previously utilised, and how it may interact with other factors in decision- making. Across various environmental/economic, academic and interpersonal hypothetical situations, Experiment 1 failed to find a significant effect of the utilised moral prime, nor a hypothesised interaction with the gratitude manipulation. Building on these results, and the theoretical and methodological implications, Experiment 2 replaced the gratitude interaction in favour of an internal feedback mechanism; with a proposed interaction effect between this and the moral prime. Significant statistical effects were found for both the refined moral prime and the internal feedback mechanism, though in both cases such effects were mixed. In the moral prime, one condition reached significance while the other did not. Similarly, one condition of internal feedback resulted in a statistically significant effect while the other failed to reach significance.

This thesis discusses a number of possible interpretations and implications of the mixed results, including the role of accessibility of scenarios and situations, the complexity of interpersonal relationship decisions and the scope of applicability of the theory in emotive rather than rational scenarios. This thesis also suggests a number of directions for future work on the theory, including the implications of different effects between sins of commissions against sins of omission in the examined decisions, and further work exploring the applicability of theory in more varied situations, amongst others. This thesis concludes by endorsing the theory as an explanation for various effects on individual decision-making and behaviour, though questioning the previously proclaimed pervasiveness of its applicability.