Introduction
Mazar & Zhong’s (2010) study demonstrates that engagement in pro-environmental behavior (purchase of green products) increases likelihood of subsequent immoral behavior, including dishonesty (experiment 3). Recent replication of this study by Hahnel et al. (2015) corroborates and extends these findings by showing that purchase of conventional (as opposed to green products) increases likelihood of pro-social behavior (willingness to fill out more pages in a questionnaire) and that this effect is moderated by environmental attitude, which makes it particularly strong in people with moderate to high levels of environmental attitude.
The present study has the following aims:
1. Conduct direct replication of Mazar and Zhong’s (2010) experiment on cheating (Experiment 3) with a control group. Such setup will allow us to study whether and which processes of moral regulation (licensing, cleansing, both or neither of them) take place.
2. Replicate analysis of moderation effect of environmental attitude on moral regulation processes originally reported by Hahnel et al., (2015). Unlike Hanhnel et al.’s (2015) study, our study will employ the same dependent variable as used in Mazar and Zhong’s (2010) study. In addition, our study will allow for separate analysis of moderation effect of environmental attitude on moral processes triggered by moral behavior (purchase of green products) as well as those triggered by purchase of conventional products (which may or may not be perceived as immoral), thanks to inclusion of the control group.