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Are those who protect the environment lying less? Quasi-experimental study of moral behavior

Publication

Abstract

Grounding of environmental attitude in moral values (e.g., Karp, 1996; Schultz a Zelezny, 1998) implies that people with pronounced levels of environmental attitude should behave more morally regardless of the context and even in situations unrelated to environmental protection. To test this hypothesis, we have conducted three experiments (N = 200 - 300).

Using Mazar and Zhong's (2010) procedure, we have induced environmental behavior as an independent variable and observed its effect on subsequent immoral behavior (cheating task adopted from Fischbacher & Föllmi-Heusi, 2013), in one-factorial (initial behavior: consumption of green products vs. consumption of conventional products) between subjects experiments. Our results show that higher morality of behavior of environmentalists is independent of context and is mediated by moral identity.