• About

Sacred Cow Chips

Sacred Cow Chips

Tag Archives: Thorstein Veblen

You’re So Virtuous… I’ll Bet You Think This Post Is About You

21 Monday May 2018

Posted by pnuetz in Moral License

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Bruno Kocher, Charity, Conspicuous Consumption, Conspicuous Virtue, Corporate Social Responsibility, Daniel Effron, Fair Trade, Freakonomics, Henrik Hagtveft, Humblebrags, John List, Joseph Rago, Keith Wilcox, License Effects, Moral License, Niceness, Prius Effect, Thales, The Declination, Theory of the Leisure Class, Thorstein Veblen

Altruism is an admirable quality, but advertising one’s altruism too much is rather unseemly. Social media has a way of coaxing humblebrags out of people, as well as not-so-humble brags: Everyone wants everyone to know that they care. That they give. That they support defenseless animals… and value diversity… and tread lightly upon the earth… and live “sustainably”… and despise polluters… and condemn racists… and want to shut down puppy mills…. and sneer upon bourgeois, consumerist values. They pay it forward!! And they want you to know!

These expressions of goodness come in many forms, and they are so common on social media that a bit of training permits a fairly rapid scroll rate through the news feed. People just can’t help but lay it on. Companies do too. So do politicians. Everyone wants everyone else to know how nice they are. It’s known as conspicuous virtue, or virtue signaling.

For now, let’s confine the discussion to relatively uncontroversial ideas or causes. If you are truly generous and perform good works on behalf of those less fortunate, that is all to the good. Racism is abhorrent. Sympathy for victims of crime, disease and natural disaster is a fine thing, including the puppies. Then what’s the harm in a little conspicuous virtue? Is it simply that it’s gauche?

Experimental economic research has discovered some nasty “license effects” associated not only with brags, but even good works with which one may be associated, such as an employer’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) efforts. That means, for example, that by announcing your goodness, you give yourself license to do bad. This interesting transcript of a Freakonomics Radio podcast includes an interview with University of Chicago economist John List and comments from social psychologist Daniel Effron of the London Business School. Both discuss research findings that should temper our enthusiasm for purposeful shows of virtue, as innocuous as those displays might seem.

First, however, List found a “supply side” benefit for employers when informing potential job seekers about the firm’s good works. He actually obtained a contract to perform a task, set up a company to do it, and then he recruited applicants. One group was told about the firm’s good works and a control group was not. The former group was significantly more productive on the job. So far, so good! However, in a separate experiment involving a more tedious task, some of the “CSR workers” had a tendency to cheat, perhaps subconsciously, in ways that made the job easier and faster, offsetting their own productivity advantage. These workers apparently felt that they had moral license to cheat, one conferred by the knowledge that the company was performing good works. Daniel Effron says:

“… people have surprisingly low standards for what counts as a moral license. It’s not just actively doing things that feel like good deeds. People feel like they have license when they reflect on the bad things they could have done, but didn’t.“

Effron describes an experiment demonstrating that consumers who declare a preference for green products have a greater likelihood of lying, cheating and stealing in a later task. Separately, those subjects who expressed support for Barrack Obama in 2008 felt more at liberty to express a seemingly prejudiced view on the hiring of a white or a black police officer. In another case, List notes that charitable deductions are associated with cheating on taxes in other ways.

It’s possible that all efforts to signal positive qualities to the world are associated with some offsetting, negative behavior. This possibility is illustrated by the research findings of Keith Wilcox, Henrik Hagtvedt, and Bruno Kocher in “The Less Conspicuous Road to Virtue: The Influence of Luxury Consumption on Socially Valued Behavior“. They find that while luxury consumption of goods is associated with greater work effort and acts of charity, conspicuous luxury consumption is associated with less effort and charity. This is a slightly different mechanism, as the signaling seems to be a show of one’s economic worth as opposed to a show of altruism or goodness. Nevertheless, the intent to signal reflects an other-directedness, not always a positive quality, and it also seems bound up with some negative social propensities.

Conspicuous consumption is a phenomenon described in 1899 by Thorstein Veblen in The Theory of the Leisure Class. Today, conspicuous virtue seems to inform a certain kind of conspicuous consumption. Joseph Rago notes the following:

“Conspicuous consumption stays with us today. But increasingly, it seems to me, many consumers are not seeking an outright demonstration of wealth. Instead, they consume to demonstrate their innate goodness. They spend not to suggest the deepness of their pockets but the deepness of their hearts. We inhabit, to update Veblen, an age of conspicuous virtue.

… Conspicuous virtue offers to those with guilty consciences a way to feel OK about consumerism. A fine scotch is vulgar. A “fair trade” scotch is righteous.”

A post on the Freakonomics blog in 2011 acknowledged a so-called “Prius” effect: people pay thousands of dollars above the economic value to the owner and the conservation value of the vehicle in order to signal to others their environmental commitment. Clearly, some consumers were willing to pay dearly for this conspicuous virtue.

Efforts to signal one’s virtue involve a desire to come off as “nice”. A recent post on the Declination blog discusses a so-called “niceness effect” under which observers seem to prefer facially “nice” points of view over the application of logic and dispassionate analysis. This brings us back into the more controversial forms of virtue signaling. A simple example: an expressed, “nice” preference for more generous public aid over proposals that improve work incentives. Unfortunately, the “niceness effect” leads to preferences for any number of irrational policies, as the author “Thales” at Declination so ably discusses. People are cowed by the appearance of “niceness” and want to look “nice” to their peers, damn the unintended consequences.

Negative license effects have been shown to exist as a dark underbelly associated with: the knowledge that one’s employer performs acts of social responsibility; not doing a bad thing that one could have done; stating a preference for goods presumed to be environmentally-sound; declaring support for electing the first African American candidate as president; claiming charitable tax deductions; and conspicuous luxury consumption. Still, granting oneself “moral license” almost surely does not offset the social benefits of real charitable acts. That’s pure conjecture on my part, of course, and it might not always be true. And I’m not so sure that acts of professing good works, intentions, and “niceness” do anything more than reassure self-nominated apostles of their goodness, while granting them license to please themselves in ways that might be regarded as sociopathic.

We live in an age of rampant narcissism, and social media can serve to magnify those tendencies. So please, promote your causes, but speak softly about your own contributions and good intentions, and try to resist the temptation to take moral license. Now where did I put the scotch?

Follow Sacred Cow Chips on WordPress.com

Recent Posts

  • The Fast Trains That Can’t
  • The Oddly Cherished Tax Refund
  • The Abolition of Wealth
  • How Empowered Bleeding Hearts Do Harden
  • “Othered” By the Left

Archives

  • February 2019
  • January 2019
  • December 2018
  • November 2018
  • October 2018
  • September 2018
  • August 2018
  • July 2018
  • June 2018
  • May 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • July 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • March 2017
  • February 2017
  • January 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • July 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • February 2016
  • January 2016
  • December 2015
  • November 2015
  • October 2015
  • September 2015
  • August 2015
  • July 2015
  • June 2015
  • May 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • October 2014
  • September 2014
  • August 2014
  • July 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014
  • April 2014
  • March 2014

Blogs I Follow

  • DCWhispers.com
  • Hoong-Wai in the UK
  • Marginal REVOLUTION
  • CBS St. Louis
  • Watts Up With That?
  • Aussie Nationalist Blog
  • American Elephants
  • The View from Alexandria
  • The Gymnasium
  • Public Secrets
  • A Force for Good
  • Arlin Report
  • Notes On Liberty
  • troymo
  • SUNDAY BLOG Stephanie Sievers
  • Cpl Kerkman Reference Guide
  • Miss Lou Acquiring Lore
  • Your Well Wisher Program
  • Objectivism In Depth
  • RobotEnomics
  • Orderstatistic
  • Paradigm Library
  • Scattered Showers and Quicksand
  • Jam Review
  • Dan Ariely

Blog at WordPress.com.

DCWhispers.com

A Peek Behind The Political Curtain

Hoong-Wai in the UK

A Commonwealth immigrant's perspective on the UK's public arena.

Marginal REVOLUTION

Small Steps Toward A Much Better World

CBS St. Louis

News, Sports, Weather, Traffic and St. Louis' Top Spots

Watts Up With That?

The world's most viewed site on global warming and climate change

Aussie Nationalist Blog

An Anglo-Australian Identitarian, Ethnonationalist and Paleoconservative Blogger

American Elephants

Defending Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness

The View from Alexandria

In advanced civilizations the period loosely called Alexandrian is usually associated with flexible morals, perfunctory religion, populist standards and cosmopolitan tastes, feminism, exotic cults, and the rapid turnover of high and low fads---in short, a falling away (which is all that decadence means) from the strictness of traditional rules, embodied in character and inforced from within. -- Jacques Barzun

The Gymnasium

A place for reason, politics, economics, and faith steeped in the classical liberal tradition

Public Secrets

Purveyors of fine twisted propaganda since 2006!

A Force for Good

How economics, morality, and markets combine

Arlin Report

COMMENTATOR FOR ALL.......SENIOR CITIZENS INFO

Notes On Liberty

Spontaneous thoughts on a humble creed

troymo

SUNDAY BLOG Stephanie Sievers

Escaping the everyday life with photographs from my travels

Cpl Kerkman Reference Guide

A collection of philosophical writings and awesome poems written with my Marines in Mind.

Miss Lou Acquiring Lore

Gallery of Life...

Your Well Wisher Program

Attempt to solve commonly known problems…

Objectivism In Depth

Exploring Ayn Rand's revolutionary philosophy.

RobotEnomics

(A)n (I)ntelligent Future

Orderstatistic

Economics, chess and anything else on my mind.

Paradigm Library

OODA Looping

Scattered Showers and Quicksand

Musings on science, investing, finance, economics, politics, and probably fly fishing.

Jam Review

"If you get confused, listen to the music play."

Dan Ariely

My Irrational Life

Cancel