Dossier : 43 leçons d'anglais pour enrichir votre vocabulaire

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Vocabulaire d'anglais, leçon n°25 : Compensatory Ethics

Résumé en anglais : Acheter bio ou faire attention à l'environnement ne refléterait pas toujours un comportement éthique dans la vie quotidienne...ce serait même souvent le contraire.

A fascinating new study has just been made showing some of the self-delusion and hypocrisy involved in ‘green purchasing.’
It seems that when people feel they have been particularly ‘moral’ or ‘virtuous’ in buying organic products, they then go and do something completely opposite – something the person sees as ‘selfish’ and completely ‘at odds’ with what they have just done. The phenomenon is known as ‘moral balancing’ or ‘compensatory ethics’.
For example, when US presidential hopeful Al Gore was found to be generating huge energy bills at home – at the same time as going on lecture tours telling people that they needed to save electricity –, he was not simply being a hypocrite, but ‘balancing’ his virtuous behaviour with something that he claimed to personally disapprove of.
“Do Green Products Make Us Better People” is an article published in the journal Psychological Science. In it, Nina Mazar and Chen-Bo Zhong put together a controversial but convincing argument that people who put on the “halo of green consumerism” are often less kind to other people.
They say: “Virtuous acts can license subsequent asocial and unethical behaviours.”
In the study, people who bought green products did not share a set amount of money given to them during the experiment. People who bought conventional products were much more generous.
The green consumers also cheated on a computer game to increase their earnings, and then lied about it. They were more willing to ‘steal’ than conventional consumers. In a game in which participants took money from an envelope to pay themselves a reward for a certain activity, green consumers were six times more likely to steal than those who bought conventional products.

The scientists were surprised at the results. They had begun on the premise that “just as exposure to the Apple logo increased creativity” – as found in a similar recent study - “given that green products are manifestations of high ethical standards and humanitarian considerations, we thought simply buying them would activate norms of social responsibility and ethical conduct”.
Dieter Frey, a social psychologist at the University of Munich, said that he wasn’t surprised. “At the moment in which you have proven your credentials in a particular area, you tend to allow yourself to stray elsewhere.”

By John English

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