And the topic of today is giving ourselves credit for things that we have done well. This is called licensing. What’s the story? Imagine you have a choice in the morning to take an action towards a particular goal. Maybe it’s doing something nice for the environment. You have the chance to do something nice in the morning and you take it. Does it influence you for the rest of the day? One thought is that it doesn’t matter. Another thought is that you did something good for the environment in the morning and may feel committed to act better throughout the day. But the finding is that often what we do is licensing. Meaning that if we did something good in the morning, we feel more comfortable doing something less good later, let’s say in the evening. Think about going to a restaurant. If you go to dinner and see an unhealthy dish on the menu with lots of fat and butter and so on. And there’s also a salad. What happens? If we have the salad, do we feel better about ordering the unhealthy dish, meaning does it license us? It turns out it does.
We did this experiment to understand how ordering one healthy dish changes our acceptance of ordering something not as healthy. And we learned that ordering something healthy, licenses us to say, “Oh I’m a good person, look at me, I ate a salad now I deserve this other less healthy dish.” But the study didn’t stop there. We asked another question: What if we only had an intention of doing a good thing? We already determined that if we order a salad, we feel virtuous and feel licensed to eat the unhealthy dish. But what if we order the salad but the restaurant is out of salad? What happens now? Does licensing still work? What if we just express the desire to do something but for a reason not connected to us, we are not able to follow through? Well, it turns out we still give ourselves credit.
In general, people don’t order the unhealthy dish that often. But if we get a salad first, we are we’re more likely to order the unhealthy dish. And if we show even an intention towards ordering the salad, that also liberates us. It also kind of creates licensing. Of course, the challenge with licensing is that it means that if we do something small and good, we might feel fine doing something big and less good. That’s the danger. If we do something big and good, it could give us permission to do something tiny and less good. That isn’t ideal but it’s not a big deal. The problem is what happens when we do something small and good, that gives us license to do something that is really not good, whether it’s for our own health or for something else.
The results show that what is more problematic is that it’s not just about doing something small and good that licenses us to do something big and less good. Even having the intention of doing something good can give us license to do something less good. There are many, many findings that show that in many ways, we are our own worst enemies and licensing is one of those things. Where small, good acts and even the intention of a small, good act can lead to opposite behavior.
So let’s be careful to not over-license.
