If we do one thing that we think is good, does that make us more likely to do a bad thing next time? The logic being that we have earned moral credit in the bank, so we don’t need to be as good next time to retain our self concept as a decent person. There is significant research stream that studies this phenomenon. It is a reasonable concern, and I think moral licensing is a potential problem. That said, I do worry about the thrust of such research into the problem of moral licensing. Hint: to my mind there is more than one problem in that the desire to study moral licensing says as much about incentives in academia as it does problems in wider humanity.
The Problem Of Moral Licensing: People Do Bad Things
Frank Cabano and Elizabeth Minton published a paper in Marketing Letters. The topic is very engaging. They addressed whether religious people are more likely to buy unethical products. In this research, the unethical brand exploits its workforce or participates in destructive overfishing.
…highly religious consumers may use their religious identity as justification for focusing on other attributes of brands (e.g., a lower cost, more luxurious brand, etc.) as opposed to the ethical nature of the brand.
Cabon and Minton (2025) page 484
The researchers show a boundary condition, i.e., where the moral licensing effect doesn’t apply. If the highly religious people also think it is important to buy ethical brands, then the effect goes away.
It won’t surprise anyone that, this paper having been published, their experiments support their hypotheses.
Researchers Want To Address Counterintuitive Questions
Part of the challenge with academia is that we need counterintuitive research. You might have the intuition that people who take their religion seriously should seek to behave ethically in their purchasing behavior. Unfortunately, that seems a bit dull and so is unlikely to be published. So clever researchers ask, “if we mess around enough can we find the opposite effect to get it published?”
One of the problems with the moral licensing research is that it works by finding something, at least somewhat, counterintuitive. Imagine you did a piece of research that says that religious people care about their ethical choices. Good luck getting that published. I can imagine if you are religious, you might feel that this paper risks not giving a fully balanced picture of religion. (Indeed, I think it risks being a bit insulting to religion and I’m not religious).
The authors try and justify the paper with some practical implications, but they aren’t the deepest.
- Public policy should focus more on telling religious people not to do bad things.
- Religious consumers should think about whether they are especially susceptible to doing bad things.
I hope the authors have fun telling the Trump administration that its messaging should insult religious voters.
The Problem Of Moral Licensing: Researchers Answer Easier, But Less Important, Questions
This leads to a wider problem. I believe you that you can find religious people doing bad things. We know this already (e.g., the crusades). We know that some religious people do good things too (e.g., stopping doing crusades). Indeed, that we can find good and bad deeds is 100% true of non-religious groups too. We can easily find plenty of good and bad deeds by any group. That is the nature of being human.
Unfortunately, the authors can’t really get to the bigger question that we care about. How does this play out in the market? They carefully say in the general discussion. (I.e., the academic bit that they care about):
“…we find that religiosity increases consumers’ purchase intentions of unethical brands.” [MY BOLD]
Carbano and Minto (2025), page 496
Yet in the practical implications at the end (the bit that academics don’t care about as much) they say:
“…given that we find that consumers high in religiosity are the most likely to purchase unethical brands…”
Carbano and Minto (2025), page 497
Yet, purchase intentions and purchases aren’t the same thing. We are much more interested in actual purchases than mere intentions to purchase in a survey. They have shown that a weird effect can happen in a situation that normal people rightly don’t care much about.
Moral Licensing Happens, How Much Happens Is The Question
Religion is a complicated thing. The authors note that theirs was a primarily Christian subject pool. That said, there are significant differences within Christianity and even between different church communities within the same religious community. We probably need to dig into things a bit more to say anything about the world. This is true but not the core problem to my mind.
If we want to give public policy advice, what we might be more interested in is the net impact on actual purchase decisions. This question could never be answered using the data they use, so I would advise them to tone down the public policy advice.
Moral Licensing
Yes, moral licensing is a fun topic. It is counterintuitive, it grabs the reader. That said, if marketers want to get involved in bigger social debates, we probably need to worry more about what happens in everyday life and a bit less on counterintuitive fun claim of the week.
For more on consumer behavior research see Who Do Consumer Researchers Study?, Cool Result: What Next?, and When Is Too Much Success A Bad Thing?
Read: Frank G. Cabano, and Elizabeth A. Minton (2025) “I am religious, therefore I am good: the influence of consumer religiosity on purchase intentions of unethical brands.” Marketing Letters, 36, 481-499.
