Moral Licensing

Discovery and key experiments

Monin and Miller (2001) showed that participants who first had a chance to disagree with sexist statements or to select a minority applicant were later more likely to say that a particular job suited a man or a White person. Once people had secured moral credentials as unprejudiced, they were less afraid of judgments that might look prejudiced. Effron, Cameron and Monin (2009) showed that participants given a chance to endorse Obama just before the 2008 US presidential election were later more willing to make judgments that favored Whites. Khan and Dhar (2006) found a licensing effect in consumer choice: consumers who thought of good deeds, such as imagining volunteering, chose luxury goods more often. Mazar and Zhong (2010) reported that participants who bought green products were more likely to cheat and steal in a later task.

Moral self-regulation and consistency effects

Sachdeva, Iliev and Medin (2009) found that participants who wrote about themselves as moral people donated less, while those who described themselves as immoral donated more. They proposed a model of moral self-regulation, in which people try to keep their moral self-image at a certain level. Merritt, Effron and Monin (2010) distinguished two ways licensing works: moral credits, in which past good deeds accumulate like a bank balance, and moral credentials, which change how later behavior is interpreted. Yet past good deeds can also produce a consistency effect, the sense that a good person must keep acting well. Conway and Peetz (2012) reported that recalling past behavior abstractly tends to produce consistency, while recalling it concretely tends to produce licensing, and Mullen and Monin (2016) reviewed the conditions that separate the two effects. Kouchaki (2011) showed vicarious licensing, in which the good deeds of fellow group members alone produce a license.

Real-world applications and the replication debate

In a field experiment giving apartment residents feedback on their water use, Tiefenbeck and colleagues (2013) found that water use fell but the same households' electricity use rose, and they interpreted this as possible moral licensing. The effect has fed debate over whether green policies, corporate social responsibility and diversity initiatives can backfire. A meta-analysis by Blanken, van de Ven and Zeelenberg (2015) reported a small but significant average effect (d≈0.31) across 91 studies, but three replication attempts by Blanken and colleagues (2014) failed to find it. Later large-scale replications also found effects much smaller than first reported, or none at all, raising the possibility that publication bias inflated the effect. Like cognitive dissonance theory, moral licensing is understood as tied to the motive to protect one's self-image, but its size and conditions remain contested.

FAQ

What is moral licensing in simple terms?

It is the feeling, after doing something good, that you have done enough and can afford to be a little less good next time. It is similar to thinking that because you worked out, a late-night snack is fine.

Is moral licensing a firmly established effect?

Early studies and a meta-analysis reported a small effect, but several later large-scale replications found it to be very small or absent. It is therefore now seen as a contested phenomenon that may appear only under certain conditions.

Sources reviewed: 2026-10-26

References

1. Monin, B., & Miller, D. T. (2001). Moral credentials and the expression of prejudice. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81(1), 33–43.
2. Khan, U., & Dhar, R. (2006). Licensing effect in consumer choice. Journal of Marketing Research, 43(2), 259–266.
3. Sachdeva, S., Iliev, R., & Medin, D. L. (2009). Sinning saints and saintly sinners: The paradox of moral self-regulation. Psychological Science, 20(4), 523–528.
4. Effron, D. A., Cameron, J. S., & Monin, B. (2009). Endorsing Obama licenses favoring Whites. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 45(3), 590–593.
5. Mazar, N., & Zhong, C.-B. (2010). Do green products make us better people? Psychological Science, 21(4), 494–498.
6. Merritt, A. C., Effron, D. A., & Monin, B. (2010). Moral self-licensing: When being good frees us to be bad. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 4(5), 344–357.
7. Kouchaki, M. (2011). Vicarious moral licensing: The influence of others' past moral actions on moral behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 101(4), 702–715.
8. Conway, P., & Peetz, J. (2012). When does feeling moral actually make you a better person? Conceptual abstraction moderates whether past moral deeds motivate consistency or compensatory behavior. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 38(7), 907–919.
9. Tiefenbeck, V., Staake, T., Roth, K., & Sachs, O. (2013). For better or for worse? Empirical evidence of moral licensing in a behavioral energy conservation campaign. Energy Policy, 57, 160–171.
10. Blanken, I., van de Ven, N., Zeelenberg, M., & Meijers, M. H. C. (2014). Three attempts to replicate the moral licensing effect. Social Psychology, 45(3), 232–238.
11. Blanken, I., van de Ven, N., & Zeelenberg, M. (2015). A meta-analytic review of moral licensing. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 41(4), 540–558.
12. Mullen, E., & Monin, B. (2016). Consistency versus licensing effects of past moral behavior. Annual Review of Psychology, 67, 363–385.