The Power of Identity Claims: How We Value and Defend the Self 9780367820459, 9780367820442, 9781003011590

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THE POWER OF IDENTITY CLAIMS

This book draws on research in psychology and behavioral economics to show how striving to live up to our identity claims profoundly affects our daily lives. The author argues the claims we make about who we are and what we stand for powerfully influence us, and our social world. Asking questions such as: Why do people resist the temptation to cheat when cheating would benefit them greatly and no one would find out? Why do people express different beliefs about climate change when they are first reminded of their political affiliation? Why do people prefer to be compensated for donating blood with cholesterol screening than with money? Miller puts forth a novel and compelling argument regarding how strongly our identity claims affect our daily lives. The book provides explanations for many forms of puzzling behavior, such as why people sometimes act against their economic self-​interest, how they avoid situations that test their moral identities, and how they respond to failures to live up to their moral identities. It paints an intriguing picture of people’s investment in their identity claims by showing how they seek opportunities to demonstrate their validity, avoid actions and circumstances that challenge their legitimacy, and employ psychological defenses when others challenge their legitimacy. Based on extensive research in the fields of psychology, economics, and political science, this book is fascinating reading for students and academics interested in identity and the self. It also provides an expanded tool kit for those who seek behavioral change in their organization or community. Dale T. Miller is Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He is a social psychologist who has published widely on topics such as social norms, social cognition, and social justice. He lives in Portola Valley, California.

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THE POWER OF IDENTITY CLAIMS How We Value and Defend the Self

Dale T. Miller

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First published 2021 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Taylor & Francis The right of Dale T. Miller to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-82045-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-82044-2 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-01159-0 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Newgen Publishing UK

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To Lara, Elena, and William

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CONTENTS

Preface  Acknowledgments 

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1 The Power of Identity Claims 

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2 Defending Identity Claims 

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3 Avoiding Identity Tests 

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4 Failing Identity Tests 

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5 Neutralizing Identity Tests 

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6 Passing Identity Tests 

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7 Social Identity Tests 

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8 Incentives and Identity Claims 

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9 Changing the Identity Relevance of Behavior 

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10 Final Thoughts  Bibliography  Index 

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PREFACE

Consider the following two stories. Cake mixes were introduced in the 1950s. Testing indicated that homemakers liked the look and taste of cakes made from a mix and said they would be pleased to serve these to their families. However, when the manufacturer released this product, sales were underwhelming. Put simply, people did not buy them. Further investigation revealed the problem. Homemakers felt uncomfortable using cake mixes because the process involved only mixing the powdered mix with water; they did not feel as if they were baking.Yes, they wanted baking made easier, but they still wanted it to be baking and compatible with their homemaker identity. So, the manufacturers incorporated a few more steps in the process. Now, the mixes required users to add eggs, oil, and milk, and to beat the batter for several minutes. This change provided an enormous boost in sales. Why did it work? The modification did not improve the appearance or taste of the cakes, and it increased the amount of effort required to use the product. It turns out, ironically, that increasing effort was the key to its success. This additional work meant that the use of mixes was now compatible with the consumers’ identities as homemakers.1 A very different story illustrating identity involves anti-​Americanism in Pakistan, which grew over the last few decades. There are frequent public displays of this sentiment, but it also features prominently in the self-​images of Pakistanis. For many citizens, being a “good” Pakistani requires being anti-​American. A thought-​ provoking pair of experiments put to the test how far Pakistanis would go to affirm their image of themselves as anti-​American. One test was in the laboratory, and one was in the homes of participants.The researchers allowed approximately 3,000 Pakistani males between the ages of 18 and 35 to receive a bonus in addition to their promised pay for a research project that required them to complete a series of innocuous surveys. Moreover, the participants indicated their interest in the bonus

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anonymously with no possibility that others or the researchers would learn their decisions. What must they do to receive this bonus? They must check a box on a form expressing their “gratitude for this bonus” to the benefactor. For half of these participants, the U.S. government was the stated benefactor, and for the other half, a well-​respected Pakistani university. In the latter case, most participants signed the form and took their bonus (roughly the equivalent of 1/​5 of a day’s wage). In the former case, almost 40% refused to check the box. Although it was a considerable amount of money, and no one would learn about it, their commitment to their anti-​American self-​image prevented them from checking the box.2 Different as these two stories are, they both illustrate the same powerful source of human motivation: identity claims. Living up to assertions about who we are and what we stand for is critically important to us. So much so, that as these examples show, we are prepared to incur considerable cost to do so. We seek opportunities demonstrating the validity of our identity claims, avoid actions and circumstances that challenge their legitimacy, and employ psychological defenses when others question their authenticity. In exploring the power of identity claims, this book weaves story and data. The story is an account of how identity claims function in social life; the data are social science research findings that support that story. For some people, the term identity claims will evoke the concept of identity politics, which has been used in various forms since the 1960s or 1970s and has gained currency with the emergence of social movements, that is, women’s rights, the civil rights movement in the U.S., the LGBTQ movement, and nationalist and postcolonial movements. Identity politics involves making claims for collective recognition based on shared identity. Additionally, it seeks to change the way people view and treat those sharing a particular identity. The identity claims I focus on in this book are not the ones we make of others, but the ones we make of ourselves.They refer not to what we see ourselves as owed by others as a consequence of our identity, but what we owe ourselves as a consequence of our identity. Both features of identity, what others owe us and what we owe ourselves, are traceable to a common aspect of modern culture—​the belief that our inner self defines who we are more than do our external roles and relations.3 The privileged dignity of the inner self entails that the state and the external world accord us certain rights, but it also involves responsibilities. We must honor the dignity of our identity claims. As those sharing the identity of homemakers have the right to respect, they also must honor their identity claims.

Notes 1 Etzioni (1988). 2 Bursztyn, Callen, Ferman, Gulzar, Hasanain, & Yuchtman (2017). 3 Fukuyama (2018).

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book owes much to many people. Benoît Monin has been a valued collaborator for over 20  years and has contributed greatly to my thinking about identity claims. One of the book’s main ideas, the distinction between moral tests and moral opportunities, emerged from extensive discussions with Benoît over a number of years. We first expressed our ideas in a chapter published in 2016. Many years before that Benoît and I collaborated on a research program on moral licensing, a topic that features prominently in Chapters 5 and 6. Finally, Benoît provided detailed comments on an earlier draft of the book. A large debt is also owed to Debbie Prentice, another long-​time and valued collaborator. I have talked to Debbie about social psychology more than anyone else over the last 30 years, so her influence no doubt is evident in many aspects of my treatment of identity claims. Chapter 9, in particular, owes much to a chapter she and I wrote on mechanisms for leveraging behavioral change. I am grateful too for her customarily insightful comments on an early draft of the book. I also wish to express my gratitude to Hazel Markus and Claude Steele for their substantial influence on my thinking about identity and identity threat. Discussions with Hajin Kim, Stephanie Lin, KC McKanna, and Julian Zlatev also influenced my thinking and helped convince me that these ideas warranted a book. They also provided helpful comments on an earlier draft of the book, as did Daniel Effron and Em Reit. Many others contributed less directly to the book. My colleagues at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business may not recognize it, but their impact on me can be found throughout the book in my discussion of economic theory and research. I  hope they will find this discussion enlightening, but that remains to be seen.

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xii Acknowledgments

Lastly, I want to acknowledge my debt to those who generated the theory and research that provide the substance of this book.Their work educated and inspired me. Even when my interpretation of their research does not correspond to their own, I want to assure them that their influence on my thinking was great. I owe a debt to all of you.

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1 THE POWER OF IDENTITY CLAIMS

Let us begin with the question: “Who are you?”Your answer, I suspect, will focus heavily on your identity.You might refer to your nationality, gender, race, religious denomination, or perhaps an interest group membership, such as a dancer or an environmentalist. Maybe you will mention self-​defining traits, such as loyal or passionate. If you currently attend an American college, you might also indicate your gender pronouns: in my case, “he, him, his.” Identities are self-​conceptions that derive from the categories in which we place ourselves, including demographics, such as gender and race, role categories (student, daughter), ideological categories (e.g., pro-​ life, libertarian), and social categories (e.g., Evangelical Christian, Democrat). Not surprisingly, given the centrality of our identities to our sense of self, they powerfully influence our psychological functioning and behavior.1 They drive the actions we take, and our evaluations of those actions—​ whether we feel good or bad.

The Motivational Power of Identities Embracing an identity is more than just endorsing a self-​description; it involves making and defending claims about oneself. Think of people who identify as a political conservative. For self-​identified conservatives to feel good about themselves, they must commit to the claim that in comparison to other ideological categories (i.e., liberal), the category conservative is desirable.They must also commit to the claim that they are a worthy version of a conservative, comparing favorably to others who claim that identity. Defending these claims will require them to embrace certain political beliefs and reject others and take specific political actions while avoiding others.

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Importantly, identity claims focus not just on what “we are” but on what “we are not.” The power of an unwanted identity is illustrated by the market failure of a product known as the personal emergency response system (PERS). This product was dramatically demonstrated in a television ad where an elderly woman calls out, “I’ve fallen, and I can’t get up!” These systems are designed to function as a neck pendant that summons emergency services when pressed. Despite being simple, effective, and relatively inexpensive, less than 4% of the over-​65 population in the U.S. have purchased this product. Moreover, a study showed that when purchasers of this system did fall, 83% of the time, they didn’t use it. The identity claim in play here would seem to be a version of the assertion, “I am not old.” Older people’s commitment to this claim appears to deter them from taking action that could potentially save their lives. As one writer puts it, “many older people would sooner thrash on the floor in distress than press a button—​one that may summon assistance but whose real impact is to admit, ‘I am old.’ ”2 From what I have said so far, it should be clear that the satisfaction and dissatisfaction people derive from identity-​relevant actions are based less on what those actions do or do not do for them than on what those actions say about them. Identity-​relevant acts are most appropriately seen not as instrumental acts (a means to an end) but as self-​expressive acts (a claim about who you are).3 Often, the same behavior can be instrumental or expressive. For some people, athletic or academic achievement will be valued as a means to an end, that is, for the tangible outcomes it produces, such as awards, scholarships, and college admissions. Those who identify as scholars or athletes, however, will also value their achievements in these domains as expressive acts that show themselves and others that they have attributes that are important to their sense of self.4 Similarly, the decision by some seniors not to buy a PERS will reflect an instrumental calculation (“it would not be helpful in an emergency”). Still, for others, perhaps most, it is an expressive claim (“I am not old”).

Identities Differ in Their Power Exactly how powerfully a particular identity affects us depends both on the strength of that identity and its momentary salience. Not all of our identities are equally important to us.5 For some of us, our racial identity will be more important to us than our gender identity and vice versa. Saying that one identity (race/​gender) is stronger or more important to us than another (gender/​race) conveys much about us. For one thing, it means that we will be more likely to see and describe ourselves in terms of characteristics of the more important identity. For another, it means that we are more likely to compare ourselves with others who share the more important identity. Additionally, it means we will be extra motivated to conform to the ideal image of the more important identity. For example, we will see

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The Power of Identity Claims  3

later that those for whom the identity of being loyal is more significant than the identity of being fair are less likely to become whistleblowers. Identities differ not just in their general strength but also in their momentary salience (how accessible in consciousness they are). Because of this, the power of a particular identity will depend upon the circumstances in which we find ourselves. Consider someone who was born in one country but grew up in another. Which identity (country of birth or country of residence) will be central to that person and thus influence her psychological functioning more? To some extent, this will depend on which of these identities is more salient to her at the time in question, as psychologist Michael Ross and his colleagues (2002) demonstrated.6 These researchers had Chinese Canadians (people who were born in China but grew up in Canada) answer survey questions about themselves either in English or Chinese. The researchers reasoned that answering in Chinese would make the participants’ Chinese identity most salient to them, whereas answering in English would make their Canadian identity most salient to them. Further, they reasoned that the extent to which their Chinese rather than their Canadian identity was more momentarily salient to them, would affect their tendency to endorse common Chinese beliefs, such as “I try to improve every day, but people should not be especially proud of self-​improvement” and “You should not feel good about your own achievements because there are many others who have achieved higher than you have.” And, just so, this was what the researchers found. When a situation highlights an important identity, people are disposed to embrace the value claims of their momentarily salient identity.7

Identity Tests versus Identity Opportunities Obviously, not all our identities are going to be relevant to each of the situations in which we find ourselves. Moreover, not all identity-​relevant situations exert the same pull on our identities. Consider a self-​identified dog lover who is confronted with one of two requests by her local humane society: (a) buy a $1 raffle ticket organized by the Society; or (b) adopt an ailing dog who needs expensive medical treatment. Both of these requests are relevant to the person’s dog-​loving identity claim, but complying or not complying with them has different meanings for that claim. In the first instance, refusing to buy the ticket has much more significance than complying, because refusing to buy the ticket undermines the dog-​loving identity claim significantly more than buying it affirms it. In the second instance, complying has more significance than not because adopting the ailing dog conforms to the dog-​loving identity markedly more than not adopting undermines it. Situations that have the greatest pull on our identities represent identity tests. Failing an identity test (e.g., not buying a raffle ticket for a dog lover) undermines a person’s identity claim and thus threatens their identity. Passing an identity test defends the identity claim in question, but does little to strengthen it. Those

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situations that do provide the person with the means to affirm an identity claim (adopting an ailing dog for a dog lover) represent identity opportunities. While these situations can confirm an identity claim, they do not carry the potential to discredit it.8 As a second illustration of the identity test—​identity opportunity distinction—​ contrast the act of getting a tattoo, say that of a tiger, for those whose college mascot is a tiger versus those whose gang’s insignia is a tiger. For gang members, getting the tattoo is likely to be an identity test. You cannot be a loyal, bona fide member of the gang without getting one. For college students, getting the tattoo may be an identity opportunity, but is unlikely to be an identity test. The decision by George Shultz, a former U.S. secretary of state and Princeton University graduate, to have the “Princeton Tiger” tattooed on his rear end indeed signified his identification with his college. Still, it was not a test of it.There is no doubt that his decision to do this expressed his commitment to his alma mater. Nevertheless, the choice of other Princeton students not to get a tattoo does not undermine their identity as a loyal alumnus.9 The material cost entailed by an action, as the previous examples suggest, is one determinant of whether an identity relevant action qualifies as an identity test or merely an identity opportunity. But it is not the only one. For example, refusing to adopting an ailing dog from her local humane society would constitute a failed identity test for a committed dog lover, not merely a passed-​up identity opportunity, if she had previously promised to do so. The promise to take an action increases the obligation to do so and hence the psychological and social cost of failing to do so.10 Whether a person considers a situation to present an identity test or an identity opportunity depends significantly on cultural representations. Culture shapes both what identities people value and which behaviors are deemed relevant to those identities. Consider the various depictions that cultures have of the appropriate response for an honorable person to have to being insulted by another. In cultures of honor, not responding to an insult with violence, or at least the threat of violence, will be constructed as failing the honorable person identity test.11 However, in cultures where impassivity and not losing face is paramount, reacting in kind to the provocation (letting it “get to you”) instead of turning the other cheek will be constructed as failing the honorable person identity test. Still, other cultures may neither prescribe nor proscribe retaliation to an insult, but instead construct the situation as one constituting an identity opportunity. Failing to turn the other cheek does not constitute a failed honorable person identity test, but choosing to do so provides a chance to affirm that identity. Finally, people in some cultures may view being the target of abuse as irrelevant to the honorable person identity, providing neither opportunities nor tests of the identity. Cultural prescriptions and proscriptions about identity tests and opportunities typically are conditional on various particularities of the individual actor. A  child’s obligation to help a person in physical distress is not the same as an

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adult’s. Moreover, a relative’s duty to assist a family member in physical danger is not the same as a stranger’s, and so on. Whether to help the victim in a crowded emergency situation might be an opportunity for a random individual, but a test for anyone who has received a supervisory role or specific training. For different people within the same culture, then, the same action may have different degrees of identity relevance and have different psychological consequences.

The Special Status of Moral Identity Identifying differences in the identities they embrace is a conventional means of differentiating people. Studying identity, thus, often involves studying identity differences across people. For example, how do those with environmentalist or conservative identities differ from those who do not, or how do those who identify as more or less masculine differ? Interestingly, there is one identity that virtually everyone holds to some degree: that of a moral person. In one study, 100,000 English-​speaking Internet users from 54 countries were asked to indicate how much they possessed each of 240 personality traits designed to assess the “character virtues” of justice, humanity, temperance, wisdom, transcendence, and courage.12 Fairness, kindness, and honesty were the traits that participants across countries most ascribed to themselves. These were also the traits that were most commonly identified as moral across many different cultural and religious traditions around the world. People like to see themselves as ethical, presumably because for most people, being a respectable person means being a moral person.13 An important feature of people’s moral identity is that it does not require them to be as moral as possible—​only to be “moral enough.” As we will see, people act as though they have a set point (a necessary resting level) concerning moral self-​ regard and are distressed when their moral self-​assessment falls below this point, while comforted when it meets or rises above it.When people are feeling insecure about their moral identity, they are especially vigilant for moral opportunities, taking actions to prove their moral worth that they would have passed up in a more secure state. The fact that a moral identity is so commonly held by people and ties to so many essential behaviors means that much of our knowledge about how identities function comes from studying how moral identities work. Empirical inquiry into the functioning of a moral identity has provided insights into how identity claims contribute to self-​regulation, how they can be leveraged to change behavior, and many other vital questions about the self. This book is about more than moral identities. Nonetheless, much of what I will discuss will focus on moral identities, both because it is the focus of much of what we know about the functioning of identity claims and because it is a fascinating topic in its own right. At its core, however, this book is about identity claims, the way they drive individual and social behavior, affect efforts to influence people, mobilize psychological and behavior defenses, and regulate people’s social lives.

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Summary Identities are self-​conceptions that derive from the categories in which we place ourselves. Embracing an identity is more than just endorsing a self-​description; it involves making and defending claims about oneself. The satisfaction and dissatisfaction that people derive from identity-​relevant actions are based less on what those actions do for them than on what those actions say about them. Exactly how powerfully a particular identity affects us depends both on the strength of that identity and its momentary salience.When a specific identity is pertinent to a particular situation, that relevance can take one of two different forms. Situations that have the greatest pull on our identities represent identity tests. Failing an identity test undermines a person’s identity claim and thus threatens that identity. Passing an identity test defends the identity claim in question, but does little to strengthen it. Those situations that do provide the person with the means to affirm an identity claim represent identity opportunities.While these situations can confirm an identity claim, they do not carry the potential to discredit it.

Notes 1 See Ellemers & van den Bos (2012), Markus & Wurf (1986), and Oyserman (2015) for reviews of the various influences that identities have on psychological functioning. 2 Gopnick (2019). 3 Dunning & Fetchenhauer (2013); Kuran (1997). 4 Bénabou & Tirole, (2006; 2011); Berkman, Livingston, & Kahn (2017). 5 Wicklund & Gollwitzer (1982). 6 Ross, Xun, & Wilson (2002). 7 This point is made by both social psychologists (Biernat,Vescio, & Green, 1996; Shih, Pittinsky, & Ambady, 1999; Turner & Tajfel, 1986; Turner, Hogg, Oakes, Reicher, & Wetherell, 1987); and economists (Akerlof & Kranton, 2000; 2005). 8 Miller & Monin (2016). 9 Kant’s (1785) distinction between perfect and imperfect duties parallels in certain respects the distinction Miller and Monin (2016) make between moral tests and moral opportunities. Kant viewed failing to perform a perfect duty as a moral transgression, for according to him, performing perfect duties is a fundamental obligation for a human being. In Miller and Monin’s language, to fail to accomplish a perfect duty is to fail a moral test. Kant’s imperfect responsibilities, what are termed moral opportunities by Miller and Monin, do not have the same moral force: They do not merit blame when they are not enacted, but do merit praise when they are completed. 10 The distinction between moral tests and moral opportunities is admittedly a simplification, as morally relevant acts all have test and opportunity elements. In the present example, failing to adopt a disabled dog possibly will discredit a dog-​loving identity to some degree, and buying a $ 1 raffle ticket likely will enhance it to some degree. The point is that the capacity of taking or not taking an action to bring discredit versus credit to a person’s identity claims will vary across situations. Those situations where the behavioral options possess a higher capability to bring discredit than the credit

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I  term moral tests; those where the behavioral options possess a higher capacity to bring credit than discredit I term moral opportunities. 11 Nisbett & Cohen (1996). 12 Park, Peterson, & Seligman, (2006). 13 Aquino & Reed, (2002); Aquino, Reed, Thau, & Freeman (2007); Bandura, (1991); Blasi (1993); Dunning (1999, 2007); Monin & Jordan (2009); Steele (1988). Research shows that seeing oneself as moral is more important than seeing oneself as competent (Ellemers, Pagliaro, Barreto, & Leach, 2008).

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2 DEFENDING IDENTITY CLAIMS

Ask the average person if she is moral, and you almost certainly will receive an affirmative answer. But what lies behind this claim? For one thing, it reflects the assertion that she possesses many moral virtues. People’s lists of their qualities that make them moral will vary, but common examples I  will discuss here include being fair, honest, and unprejudiced.1 We can see the importance of such claims to people both in the ways they conduct their everyday life and in their reflections upon that conduct.

I Am Fair The eighteenth-​ century social philosopher David Hume (1739) famously proclaimed that people were “knaves” who followed only their own self-​interest. Adam Smith (1776/​2000), another famous social philosopher and the patron saint of modern economics, defined the pursuit of self-​interest as “the augmentation of fortune,” and, to this day, the field of economics views the pursuit of self-​interest as the organizing principle behind human behavior. By using the term “fortune,” Smith clearly defined the pursuit of self-​interest as the pursuit of economic or material gain. Since Smith, some economists have sought to broaden the definition of self-​ interested behavior to include the pursuit of anything that a person values (provides utility). For example, running into a burning building to save a stranger can be construed as self-​interested behavior by positing that people value what others say about them after they die. Accordingly, what might seem to be a self-​sacrificing act actually can be seen as what one economist, perhaps but not necessarily facetiously, called “obituary enhancing.”2 The reason that economists have stretched the definition of what constitutes self-​interest is the frequency with which people resist

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the opportunity to augment their fortune when distributing resources. One big reason for this is that people’s identity of themselves as fair often motivates them to take actions that undermine rather than promote their self-​interest. To establish both the existence and power of people’s claim to be fair, researchers have sought to show that honoring this claim can lead people to act contrary to their self-​interest and that dishonoring this claim, by working solely in their self-​interest, prompts people to resort to a wide range of effortful and sometimes self-​defeating rationalizations.

Fair Dictators In their quest to understand human behavior, social scientists frequently observe how people react in what is known as experimental games. An experimental game presents people with a simple situation in which they must make one of two or three choices, with each option representing the influence of a different motivation (e.g., cooperation versus competition). One experimental game currently fashionable is a two-​person game known as the dictator game.This game provides one player (the dictator) with a sum of money (e.g., $20) and asks him to decide how much, if any, he would like to share with another (the recipient). Dictators can keep all the money (known as their endowment) for themselves, and this is what they would be expected to do if they were motivated solely by self-​interest. But this is not what they typically do. Based on hundreds of experiments, more than 60% of dictators pass a positive amount of money to the recipient, with the mean transfer being roughly 20% of the endowment.3 Undoubtedly, people’s behavior as dictator-​for-​a-​day suggests that something is going on that does not square with the pursuit of their narrowly defined self-​ interest, but what? For some economists, it suggests that people must have a “taste” for something that is achieved (a self-​interest that is furthered) by sharing their endowment with others. One suggested possibility is that people have a taste for seeing that the welfare of others is enhanced, not merely their own. That is, they derive gratification (utility) not only from augmenting their fortune but from augmenting that of others as well.4 But, there is another possibility: the desire to be true to their identity as a fair and moral person. Now, think about the difference between these two possibilities as follows. According to the first possibility, the act of sharing with the recipient is an instrumental act that has as its goal seeing the recipient’s welfare enhanced. According to the second possibility, the act of sharing with the recipient is an expressive act that has as its purpose showing you and others the kind of person you are—​a fair, decent one. But how would you ever decide which of these interpretations is correct? Economists Heidi Crumpler and Philip Grossman (2008) offered a clever means of doing so. They modified the dictator game such that the recipient was a charity to which the dictator could give anywhere between all or none of her endowment. The instructions specified, however, that the experimenter would

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compensate the charity for anything that the participant did not give.Thus, even if the participant kept everything, the charity would still get 50% of the endowment. This modification meant that if the participants’ acts of sharing with the charity were an instrumental act, motivated to ensure that the charity got some money, this modification should eliminate their generosity, as it would no longer be necessary to achieve their goal. However, it would continue to be essential if sharing was an expressive act, motivated by the goal of signaling to themselves and others that they were fair-​minded people. The promised action of the experimenter may satisfy the need to see the other benefited, but it would not permit the person to affirm their self-​image as a fair person. Affirmation of their identity as a fair-​minded person requires not only that the charity be helped, but that they be the one who provided that help. So, what happened? The results showed that dictators still gave a substantial fraction of their endowment to the charity (around 20%) even though doing so did not materially affect the outcome of the charity. Sharing in the dictator game would thus seem primarily to be an expressive act, motivated by the desire to affirm a self-​image or a social image as a fair person.

Fairness Is in the Eye of the Beholder Research on the dictator game shows that people’s desire to be fair constrains their desire to “augment their fortune.” In fact, wishing to defend their claim to be fair prevents them from keeping more than 80% of the money for themselves. In their heart of hearts, they may prefer to retain all the money, but the price for doing that—​failing an identity test—​appears to be too steep. But, is there a way they could keep more of the money without undermining their claim to be a fair person? One avenue for doing this would be to convince themselves that keeping more, even all, of the money does not constitute unfairness on their part. Despite pursuing their self-​interest, by convincing themselves that such actions do not compromise their identity as a fair person, people can do so with a clear conscience. As it turns out, people are remarkably good at finding ways to convince themselves that acting in their self-​interest does not constitute a failed identity test.5 To learn the strategies that people use to convince themselves that the morally fraught choice they face is not a moral test, researchers put people in situations that vary on one or more dimensions to see if that makes a difference in their willingness to take the morally questionable action. By learning what features of a situation make it more or less challenging to act selfishly, we learn about the psychological tactics people use to have their cake and eat it too. Here is an example of one tactic people use. Not only are people assigned the roles of dictator and recipient by chance in the standard dictator game, but the endowment given the dictator is unearned by them. As such, the funding could reasonably be seen by the dictator (and the recipient) as a “windfall.” What if the

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dictator had a more legitimate claim to the endowment? For example, what if the money possessed by the dictator were earned property rather than a bestowed endowment? Would fairness principles make it legitimate for the dictator to keep more of the money in this circumstance? As it happens, research shows that dictators who earned their initial funding through effort felt a greater sense of entitlement to it and, as a consequence, shared significantly less of it.6 The finding that believing they have earned their endowment permits identity-​sensitive dictators to share less with the recipient has an interesting implication. Namely, those in the dictator role have a strong incentive to use lax criteria when assessing whether their endowment was “earned.” Consider this. What if dictators had not earned their funding by effort but merely by a lucky guess? Would they still be able to convince themselves that they were entitled to keep more of it? An intriguing experiment suggests that they would.7 The experimenters assigned participants to the dictator role because their guess of a number randomly generated by a computer was closer than that provided by the other participant. For these dictators to claim to have earned their endowment would seem highly suspect; they only got it by what they surely would have to admit was a lucky guess. Nevertheless, they acted as though the dictates of fairness permitted them to keep more of it. This behavior reveals a pattern we will see over and over again. People’s desire to see themselves as fair exerts a powerful and constraining force on the pursuit of their self-​interest but only to the extent that they are unable to convince themselves of the inherent fairness of their self-​interested actions. Now, consider a study conducted by psychologist Eddy Van Avermaet (1974). Participants worked in pairs on a task that required completing questionnaires.The researcher led them to believe that one of four outcomes had occurred: (a) they and the other either completed the same number of questionnaires and worked the same amount of time, (b) they completed more questionnaires but worked less time than the other, (c) they completed fewer questionnaires but worked longer than the other, or (d) they completed fewer questionnaires and worked less time than the other. Then, the researcher allowed them to divide anonymously $7 between themselves and the other person. What would a fair division of the payment be? Unlike in the dictator game, this task pits different fairness principles against one another: Specifically, it pits the idea that people’s pay should depend on their effort (who worked longer) against the sense that it should rely on their productivity (who completed the most questionnaires). So, which principle did people follow? To begin with, participants’ divisions clearly showed some concern with fairness, as they did not keep all the money for themselves. Participants were also sensitive to their contributions relative to those of the other in their division of the pay. They gave the other more than they gave themselves when the other had both completed more questionnaires and worked longer than they did. But what did they do when the other had contributed more on one dimension

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(e.g., completed more questionnaires or worked longer) but less on the other? In short, what did they think was a fairer basis on which to divide the pay: effort or productivity? As it turns out, it depended on which principle favored them. The participants gave themselves more than 50% of the compensation payment when they either did more questionnaires than the other (but worked for a shorter time) or worked longer than the other (but did fewer questionnaires). Their conception of themselves as fair people did constrain their pursuit of self-​interest but not wholly.They did the fair thing and gave themselves less when both of the relevant principles (effort and productivity) favored the other, but when they and the other differed on these dimensions, they were able to convince themselves that the fairest principle was the one that favored them.8

I Will Be Fair Unless It Means I Lose Consider one more study that shows people both care about being fair and are skilled at not letting this concern get in the way of their self-​interest.9 Participants arrived at the experiment and were told by the researchers that they and another participant would be doing one of two tasks, with one being much more pleasant than the other.The experimenter explained that most participants think it is fairer if they toss a coin to see who gets which task, but that it was up to them to decide how to divide the tasks. Fifty percent of participants agreed to toss the coin anonymously, with 50% refusing to do so. Of those who refused to toss the coin, the majority took the pleasant task for themselves. Participants’ willingness to toss the coin would seem to show their inherent fairness, as agreeing to do so voluntarily puts them at risk of losing the desirable task. On the one hand, should they win the toss, they would both show their commitment to fairness and get their preferred outcome. On the other hand, should they lose the coin toss and honor their commitment to abide by it, they would be stuck with their least preferred result. As it turns out, however, many who chose to toss the coin decided not to abide by its outcome. We know this because 90% of those who tossed the coin (as opposed to the 50% you would expect by chance) claimed the pleasant task for themselves. This aftermath is surprising, as you might think that it would be especially dishonorable to commit yourself to fairness only to renege on this commitment when the chips don’t fall your way. So, why might it be acceptable to people’s sense of fairness to agree to toss a coin, lose the toss, and then claim the prize? One possibility is that people on the losing side of a self-​initiated coin toss interpreted their mere willingness to toss the coin as evidence of their strong commitment to fairness, reasoning (incorrectly) that most people would likely take the appealing task. People’s thinking might go like this: “I chose to toss the coin, which shows that I am fair. Thus, I am a fairer person than most, even though I am now choosing the pleasanter task after losing

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the coin toss.” Having generated this counterfactual evidence of their virtue, they were able to minimize the significance of their unfairness. As an aside, this type of reasoning might help explain why adolescents who take a virginity pledge, despite being as likely as non-​pledgers to have premarital sex, are less likely to use contraception.10 How? Well, it might be that having premarital sex without contraception undermines the identity claim of virginity pledgers less than having it with contraception. Specifically, the identity-​based satisfaction they derived from their virginity pledge may be easier to preserve if its violation was spontaneous than if it was planned: “At least I tried to honor the pledge, which is more than others probably did.”

I Am Honest Consider another moral test people face:  the temptation to act dishonestly to augment their fortune. Now, people regularly engage in dishonest behavior, for example, overcharging clients, overstating insurance claims, returning used goods as new, or lying on a resume, just to name a few examples.11 To attach some numbers to this claim:  One poll of daily dishonest behavior found that 93% admitted to engaging in one or more kinds of dishonesty at work or school, such as calling in sick when not ill (63%), taking office supplies from work (63%), and lying on a resume (18%).12 Given the prevalence of dishonesty, you might think that people don’t value being honest. Some probably do not, but recall that despite often acting unfairly, people nevertheless are strongly motivated to see themselves as fair. How can we square the fact that people so regularly succumb to the temptation to act dishonestly with a commitment to being honest? In considering this question, a good place to start is to understand better precisely how dishonest people are.

I Am Not Really a Cheater One context in which people’s dishonesty can be quantified is at so-​ called honor stands where customers have the opportunity to remove a product (e.g., a newspaper) from a stand and then leave their payment. The amount left is then compared to the price the vendor asked customers to leave. This comparison invariably reveals some dishonesty. One study in the Netherlands found that open-​ box payments for candy bars in office locations collected 20% less than the list price.13 A similar analysis of the amount left for nearly 75,000 deliveries of bagels and donuts to office buildings in the U.S.  over 12  years found that purchasers left 12% less than the posted price.14 These examples indeed suggest that people will cheat to augment their financial well-​being. More striking about these cases, however, is how relatively little dishonesty people show. In the honor-​stand situations, for example, the amount people leave is heartwarmingly close to the list price.15 Were people’s dishonesty entirely in line with their self-​interest, one would

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not expect so many people to pay for something they didn’t have to. As it is, the honor-​stand findings suggest that people frequently resist the temptation to act dishonestly, possibly because they wish to see themselves as basically honest. Many lab experiments have also tried to quantify people’s inclination to lie and cheat. One of the most popular lab methods asks research participants to roll a six-​sided die.16 The die is in a small cup that is covered so that only one of the six numbers rolled can be seen through a tiny hole by the participant, ensuring no risk of detection or punishment for lying. After each roll, the experimenter calls out the winning number, and the participant indicates whether or not she rolled it. Each side/​number is rewarded by a corresponding amount of money, except for “6,” which results in a zero payoff. Although the private nature of people’s actual roll in the die-​in-​the-​cup game makes it impossible to tell if any individual’s report was truthful or not, researchers can assess the degree of lying that goes on in a group of participants by seeing how much more frequently the winning score is claimed by participants than would be expected by chance. Given that there should be no fear of being caught in the die-​toss experiment, and assuming that people are purely profit maximizing, we should expect a great deal of lying. A  group of researchers looked at data from over 32,000 research participants from 43 countries who had participated in this game to assess whether this is the case.17 The researchers found that while cheating (lying) certainly goes on, there was much less than there could have been. One analysis showed that while 22% lied all the time, 40% never lied. Other laboratory studies that used different methods also found comparably low rates of dishonesty.18 These studies all revealed that while many people lie and cheat, very few (approximately 1%) cheat as much as they would if they were simply trying to maximize their outcomes. The constraints on dishonesty, it appears, reflect more than the likelihood and consequence of getting caught. People seem to prefer not to cheat or lie and rarely gain the full benefit of dishonesty, even when there is no possibility of their being detected or punished.19 Let us dig a little deeper into people’s inclination to act dishonestly.You might expect that dishonesty will increase as the temptation intensifies, but this may not always be the case as an increased temptation (self-​benefit) often is associated with increased harm to others.20 This may explain the finding from an experiment in an Israeli restaurant that as the amount of a waiter’s overpayment of change to the customer increased, so did the likelihood that the customer would bring it to the waiters’ attention.21 It appears that the moral test the customer is failing increases in magnitude with the size of the overpayment, and, as such, it becomes increasingly less worth keeping it. A similar account may explain the results of an ambitious study that behavioral scientist Alain Cohn and his colleagues conducted.22 These researchers “lost” 17,303 wallets across 40 countries in public and private institutions. The wallets had either no money in them, a small amount of money ($13.45), or a large amount of money ($94.15). Each wallet contained a business card with a

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fictitious person’s name, number, and address and a grocery list.The most striking finding was that the likelihood that someone returned the wallet increased with the amount money it contained. Wallets containing no money were returned 40% of the time; wallets containing a small amount of money were returned 51% of the time; and wallets containing a large amount of money were returned 72% of the time. People may be reluctant to advance their self-​interest by acting dishonestly, but is it their moral self-​image that keeps them from doing so? There are a couple of ways to evaluate this possibility. One is to see if people who have the strictest moral images—​the ones who will pay the highest psychological costs for failing moral identity tests—​are the ones most likely to resist cheating.23 The answer here appears to be “yes.” A second approach is to see if reminding people of their moral identity decreases dishonesty. One example of this approach involved a European honor newspaper stand where experimenters compared the impact that “legal” versus “moral” reminders had on customers’ inclination to pay the full price for their newspaper.24 The moral reminder, expressed as: “The paper costs 1 Euro, thank you for being honest,” reduced underpaying by 25%. The legal reminder expressed as: “The paper costs 1 Euro. Not paying is illegal,” reduced underpaying but only by 10%. Forcing people to look themselves in the eye (mirror) when they are deciding whether to act dishonestly also has been found to reduce cheating.25

It Is Not Really Cheating Previously, we saw in the case of fairness concerns that people, through rationalizations, can avoid or minimize the moral identity pangs that attend morally problematic actions. It appears that a similar process occurs in the case of dishonesty concerns. By learning what features of a situation make it more or less likely to act dishonestly, we learn about the tactics people use to have their cake and eat it too. Here’s one example of people’s capacity to con their all-​too-​receptive conscience. In this study, some participants rolled a die three times, but the researchers told them to only report the first roll.26 These participants reported higher (more lucrative) numbers for the first (paid) roll than those who rolled the die only once. This result cannot be explained rationally as the odds of rolling a high number are the same whether one just rolls the die once or only reports the first of three rolls. But participants appeared not to be analyzing this situation rationally. The key might be that rolling a die three times increases the likelihood of rolling a higher number. This is important because if participants rolled a high number on the second or third roll, it might seem less of a lie to claim that they rolled a high number on their first toss. In their (biased) minds, this lie was closer to being the truth. As behavioral economist Saul Shalvi and his colleagues put it: “People won’t invent facts, but they will shuffle the facts.”27

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I Am Not Prejudiced Up to this point, I have cast the role of moral identity as a constraint on people’s whole-​hearted pursuit of self-​interest. I  have done this because this is how we most clearly show the influence of our moral identity. Self-​interest is a powerful motive, and to show that another motivation can reduce the impact of self-​interest makes a strong case for the power of that motive. But pursuing motives other than self-​interest can also compromise people’s moral identity. Consider prejudice. Being prejudiced against groups of people is inconsistent with most people’s moral identity, leading them to experience identity pangs when they take actions that appear motivated by bias.Treating people differently because of their race, physical attributes, or sexual orientation disqualifies you as a moral person.

That Was Not Prejudice To begin our discussion of the influence of moral identity on the expression of prejudice, consider the tension between people’s discomfort with having close contact with physically stigmatized individuals and their sense that it is morally wrong to discriminate against people because of their physical attributes. A clever study by psychologist Melvin Snyder and his colleagues confronted research participants with just this tension.28 The researchers recruited participants to provide feedback on different types of comedy (slapstick versus stand-​up). They entered a suite of rooms, and had to decide where they would sit to watch a comedy movie. In one room, a person in a wheelchair was also waiting to watch the film; the other room was empty.Which seat would you expect people to choose? If the participants felt uncomfortable sitting next to the disabled individual, you might predict that they would avoid this person and sit in the empty room. On the other hand, if they were even more uncomfortable displaying an aversion to the disabled participant, you might predict that they would choose to sit next to that person. In this case, it turns out that their decision depended critically on a simple manipulation of the experimenters:  whether the movie shown on the two monitors was the same or different. When the film was the same in both rooms, the majority (58%) of participants chose to sit next to the disabled confederate. This behavior could reflect the motivation to affiliate with stigmatized people or merely the motive to not appear prejudiced against them. Which of these two motives it is becomes clarified when we see participants’ seat choice when a different movie was playing in the two rooms. Only 17% chose next to the stigmatized person in the two-​different-​movies condition. In this circumstance, it appears participants were comfortable choosing not to sit next to a stigmatized person because they could claim plausibly that prejudice (an illegitimate motive) was not behind their choice. Now, there was a legitimate reason for why they chose the seat they did: They preferred to watch slapstick/​stand-​up over stand-​ up/​slapstick. The presence of motivational ambiguity in a situation (such as was

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Defending Identity Claims  17

created by having two movies) provides less-​than-​noble actors with psychological cover: It becomes impossible to rule out the possibility that the motive for their potential identity-​threatening action was the morally neutral one rather than the morally suspect one. Other researchers also have documented the reduced identity fallout that attends the taking of morally suspect actions when those actions are also compatible with legitimate motivations or preferences. In one relevant study, male and female college students made hiring recommendations about men and women for a stereotypical male position (CEO of a cement company).29 The researchers assumed that these college student participants would experience tension in making this recommendation. On the one hand, they would feel concerned that the position would not be one in which a woman would be comfortable or flourish. On the other hand, they would worry that recommending a male over a female would smack of sexism. Fortunately for the participants, the researchers gave them a way of escaping their dilemma by asking them to rate experience versus education as a qualification for the job. When the male candidate had the highest level of education, 66% indicated this was the most important qualification. The number dropped to 43%, however, when it was the female candidate who had the most education. By advocating for the importance of education over experience, the participants were able to make it seem that by recommending the man over the woman, they were not revealing their sexism but a much less threatening belief about the importance of different credentials.

It Was the Alcohol Talking Sometimes, people’s quest to justify their prejudiced actions or feelings will lead them to distance those reactions from their true selves. One study that illustrated this looked at the effect that alcohol can have on people’s willingness to express prejudice. The researchers were interested in both the impact of actually consuming alcohol and merely thinking they had consumed alcohol on the inclination of White participants who varied in their support for racist beliefs to judge Blacks more stereotypically. The researchers assessed racism by the degree of agreement with statements such as “Blacks have jobs that the Whites should have,” and “Most Blacks living here who receive support from welfare could get along without it if they tried.” The participants viewed a videotape of an interaction between a Black and a White man that included a scene in which the Black man gave an ambiguous shove to the White man. The researchers asked the participants to indicate how aggressive they thought the shove was. The study found that those White participants who were high in racism and knowingly consumed alcohol, judged the shove by the Black man to be more aggressive than their non-​consuming counterparts. Even more striking, White participants high in racism who did not

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consume alcohol, but only thought they had, attributed greater aggressiveness to the Black man. Thinking they were intoxicated, despite not being drunk, seemed sufficient to provide these people with an excuse for expressing their anti-​Black feelings. Being able to claim “it was the alcohol talking” appeared to make their racist actions more acceptable to the racist Whites.30

Is Moral Behavior for Private or Public Consumption? When discussing the strategies people use to promote a positive view of their morally dubious actions, one question that invariably arises is the audience for such strategies. Is it the actor or others? Putting the question more sharply, are people concerned with how they look to themselves or only how they look to others? In most of the research I  have reported there is no way to answer this question. People could be exploiting ambiguity to protect their self-​image, their social image, or both. No doubt, people care about how they are seen by others and often worry more about how their actions will look to others. Among other things, this can lead people to engage in more socially desirable behavior in public than in private. For example, people will pay more for fair trade chocolates in front of others than when alone31 and will work harder in front of others than in private when their effort benefits a charity.32 A desire to look virtuous in front of others may also explain why people also invest more in visible green products (e.g., solar panels) than hidden ones (e.g., green household cleaners).33 Of course, these findings, while demonstrating that people care about their public image, do not imply that people don’t care about their perception of themselves. The position I take here is: People care both about how they see themselves and about how others see them concerning their identity claims. The previously cited philosopher Adam Smith (1759) put it this way: “Man naturally desires not only to be loved, but to be lovely; or to be that which is the natural and proper object of love” (p. 184). Assessing how significant a role each of these concerns plays in a particular empirical finding, however, can be challenging if not impossible. Assuming that reader skepticism is higher about people having private identity concerns than public identity ones, I will endeavor to draw particular attention to those findings that point to the role of the former. I have already described one experimental paradigm that shows the power of private and not just public identity concerns. I speak here of the die-​tossing procedure used to assess people’s propensity to lie. In that procedure, the researchers place the die in a small, covered cup, which allows the participant to see one of six numbers rolled through a tiny hole. Given that no one other than the participant can tell if they cheat (i.e., reported rolling a number they didn’t), their concern with their private identity rather than their public identity can be the only reason why cheating is relatively rare here.

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Summary People see themselves as moral actors, motivated to act by moral precepts such as fairness, honesty, and egalitarianism. Despite the great store people put in their identity as a moral person, however, they often act in ways that contradict it.Their willingness to deviate from their moral ideals in favor of less-​than-​noble motivations is especially great under two conditions.The first is when contextual factors render ambiguous the real motives behind their actions. In these cases, the context raises “reasonable doubt” about any charge that the person was acting immorally, allowing for the possibility that the act could reflect a genuine principle or legitimate preference.The second condition in which we find people acting inconsistently with their moral identity is when circumstances allow them to minimize the extent of their fall from grace. For example, we saw that die-​tossing participants who rolled a winning number on the second or third roll acted as though it were a less momentous lie to say they rolled it on the first roll (the only one that counted) than those who rolled the die only once.

Notes

1 Hardy & Carlo (2005) provide a fuller list of moral traits. 2 Hirschman (1977). 3 See Camerer (2003) for a review of relevant research. 4 Fehr & Schmidt (1999); Rabin (1993). 5 Bersoff (1999). 6 Cherry, Frykblom, & Shogren (2002). 7 Kandul & Nikolaychuk (2017). 8 Other research also finds that workers adopt the principle that gives them the most substantial amount of joint profit as the fairest (Frohlich, Oppenheimer, & Kurki, 2004; Rodriguez-​Lara & Moreno-​Garrido, 2012). 9 Batson, Kobrynowicz, Dinnerstein, Kampf, & Wilson (1997); Batson, Thompson, Seuferling, Whitney, & Strongman (1999). 10 Rosenbaum (2009). 11 Weber, Kurke, & Pentico (2003). 12 These everyday, dishonest acts impose massive costs on both organizations and society as a whole. For example, the cost of stealing from workplaces is estimated at $ 52 billion annually in the U.S. alone (Pinsker, 2014). 13 Haan & Kooreman (2002). 14 Levitt (2006). 15 Gerpott (2017). 16 Fischbacher & Föllmi-​Heusi (2013) This paradigm is the one used most widely in the literature. Several recent studies have shown that behavior in it correlates well with cheating behavior outside the lab (Cohn, Fehr, & Maréchal, 2014; Cohn, Maréchal, & Noll, 2015; Dai, Galeotti, & Villeval, 2017; Gächter & Schulz, 2016; Hanna & Wang, 2013; Potters & Stoop, 2016). 17 Abeler, Nosenzo, & Raymond (2016).

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18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

Mazar et al. (2008); Pascual-​Ezama et al. (2014). Gneezy, 2005; Nogami & Yoshida (2013). Gneezy (2005). Azar,Yosef, & Bar-​Eli (2013). Cohn, Maréchal, Tannenbaum, & Zünd (2019). Mulder & Aquino (2013). Mazar, Amir, & Ariely (2008). Falk (2017) manipulates self-​image concerns by having people face a real-​time web-​ cam video of themselves as they are making decisions about whether to shock someone to earn 8€.When there is no video, 70% of participants accept this deal, while only 54% do when watching themselves. Shalvi, Dana, Handgraaf, & De Dreu (2011); Shalvi, Eldar, & Bereby-​Meyer (2012). Shalvi, Gino, Barkan, & Ayal (2015). Snyder, Kleck, Strenta, & Mentzer (1979). Norton,Vandello, & Darley (2004). Reeves & Nagoshi (1993). Teyssier, Etile, & Combris (2015). Ariely, Bracha, & Meier (2009). Sexton, S. E., & Sexton (2011).

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3 AVOIDING IDENTITY TESTS

The last chapter demonstrated that people are highly protective of their self-​ images and resist acting contrary to them. They have a good reason for this, for when people do behave contrary to their identities, they pay for it in diminished self-​regard. The fear of losing self-​respect makes people even willing to incur material costs so as not to fail an identity test. Recall that we saw this in the dictator game with dictators ready to provide a substantial amount of their endowment (on average, 20%) to the recipient so as not to appear to themselves (or others) as unfair. Also, we saw that people in their desire to both pursue their self-​interest and avoid the perception of failing an identity test, whether in the dictator game or elsewhere, have a large bag of reality-​distorting cognitive tools from which to draw.These tools allow them to convince themselves that their self-​serving actions do not compromise their identities as fair, honest, principled people. However, these are not the only options available to them.They have another maneuver they can deploy to protect their identities: avoiding the identity test altogether.

Avoiding Having to Share The identity test faced by those in the dictator game is clear:  If the dictators choose to keep all of the endowment for themselves, as is their right under the rules of the game and often their preference, they compromise their identities as fair and decent people. What if dictators could avoid both facing the decision of how much to share and the identity test that decision poses for them? Turns out, this is an attractive option for dictators. Indeed, 25% of dictators are willing to surrender 10% of their endowment to opt out of the game, thereby sidestepping the identity test that a dependent recipient creates for them.1

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Think about it.This means that even though facing a recipient and giving them nothing would permit dictators to retain 100% of their endowment, they prefer to forfeit 10% and avoid the situation. Why would people do this? If the rules of the game forced them to give some substantial amount of their endowment to the recipient, an option that provided them with an escape route at the cost of only 10% of their endowment understandably would be attractive. But the rules do not force them to give the recipient any of their endowment. So, why would a dictator not prefer to keep 100% of the endowment for themselves rather than exit the game? Thinking through this puzzle illuminates the motivation behind dictators’ willingness to share their endowment in the traditional version of the game. To begin with, it suggests that their motivation is not a genuine concern with the welfare of the recipient. If it were, the option to exit the game would not be attractive since it deprives the recipient of any part of the endowment. Nor does the motivation behind sharing appear to be the anticipation of a resultant “warm glow” from sharing.2 Exiting the game deprives dictators of this as well. Instead, their motivation for exiting the game appears to be that this action enables them to avoid an identity test at a financial cost of around half that (10% versus 20% of their endowment) which they would bear from not leaving and passing the identity test. One could question, of course, whether the dictators would also incur a psychological cost by avoiding the test, as this too would be depriving the recipient of money. They may well be paying a price for doing this, but any such cost appears smaller than that which comes from directly denying the recipient a portion of the endowment.3 Before leaving our discussion of the dictator game, one point needs to be emphasized: Dictators are not evading the identity test because they think they will fail it by stiffing the recipient. Some will, but most of those who opt out of the game, the data suggest, would pass it were they to stay.4 However, passing the test will bring them little consolation.The best they could hope for is feeling relief at having dodged a psychological bullet. Essentially, they have been put in a no-​ win situation: If they share, they lose money; if they don’t share, they look like a scrooge. Better not to be in harm’s way in the first place.

Avoiding Requests In the dictator game, no one actually makes a request of another. In everyday life, one often encounters a direct request from someone for assistance or a donation. In some instances, appeals such as these might provide identity opportunities that, if seized, can leave the donor feeling good about themselves. Requests would be likely viewed in this way were people looking to affirm or reinforce their image as a generous, sympathetic person. More often, however, requests will be seen as identity tests where the would-​be helper feels pressured to give and is only relieved (though possibly also resentful) following the donation or assistance.

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Identity tests such as these, as we have seen, are fraught, as there is no winning. People either will be out some money or will feel bad about not having donated. Feeling trapped with no good outcome should make the opportunity to exit such situations desirable to people.5 Let’s look at two field experiments that show that people who are otherwise inclined to comply with requests for donations, often prefer to expend effort to avoid such appeals altogether. Economist James Andreoni and his colleagues conducted a charity donation experiment at a supermarket where collectors were standing at some but not all exits of the store.6 As in the dictator experiment described earlier, people here faced a choice. They could leave by a door that passed a collector or choose to leave the store by a more distant exit where they could avoid being asked to donate (opt out). The researchers found that most customers took longer routes when exiting the supermarket rather than be confronted by the charity collector. A similar field experiment manipulated the warning homeowners received before a solicitor came to their door asking for a donation.7 When the solicitor’s visit was announced the day before, they collected fewer donations because people opened their door less often. Homeowners appeared aware they would have a difficult time saying no when face-​to-​face with the solicitor, so chose to avoid the prospect by not opening the door. The would-​be donors’ behavior in these field experiments is consistent with that observed in the opt-​out version of dictator games. It shows that often people’s willingness to give money to another is due neither to a desire to improve the welfare of the other, nor to a desire to experience a warm glow that helping another might provide. The research establishes this by showing that people often prefer to avoid the opportunity to benefit others. The reason for avoiding the donation ask, I argue, is that the request poses an identity test that has a lose-​lose feel. They either will unhappily donate money under pressure or will not but feel guilty.8 Nonetheless, since all of the donation studies discussed so far involve direct appeals from a solicitor, maybe what people are avoiding is having to say no face-​ to-​face.That is, perhaps it is not a test of their own identity that people are avoiding but merely having to say no to people’s faces. Another study shows that people’s desire to evade donation requests is not restricted to those that occur face-​to-​face. This study took advantage of a Swedish community’s gradual change to a newer form of recycling machine for cans and bottles.9 In this community, consumers paid a deposit on products in cans and bottles that they could recover by returning the empties at a recycling machine located in large supermarkets. Except there was a catch. The new receptacles, unlike the old ones, allowed consumers to donate their deposit returns to charity.The researchers wanted to see if people’s willingness to use the machines was affected by the new donation option. Comparing the weight of recycling cans and bottles before and after introducing the new receptacles showed an immediate drop. People were using the machines less when they included a donation option. However, they

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were not recycling less. Instead, they took their recycling to other stores (presumably more distant from their homes) where old machines remained. We know this because the overall weight of recycled material across stores remained the same. As one final example of people’s desire to avoid identity tests presented by donation opportunities, consider contexts where customers are asked to “pay-​what-​ you-​want” (PWYW).10 These situations convert traditional economic exchanges into identity tests. People must choose whether to reciprocate the trust they were shown by the merchant or violate it and save money. Research contrasting PWYW and standard exchanges finds two interesting results. First, people pay more than you might think they would in PWYW situations and anonymous buyers don’t pay lower prices than their non-​anonymous counterparts.11 Second, people will often avoid PWYW situations. The reason, presumably, is that these situations present customers with a dilemma. On the one hand, they worry about paying less than a fair price and thereby failing an identity test. This can lead them to feel compelled to give money they neither want to nor have to give.12 On the other hand, they worry about overpaying. As in the dictator game, there is no winning. It is better to avoid the situation altogether.

Avoiding Gifts People not only seek to avoid requests but also sometimes unsolicited gifts as well. The reason for this is that one of the most potent and universal standards is the norm of reciprocity, which prescribes that the receipt of a gift creates an obligation to reciprocate. When people receive a gift, whether they wanted it or not, failing to give in return constitutes a failed moral identity test. This is well known to solicitors, who routinely leverage the reciprocity norm to their advantage. For example, psychologist Robert Cialdini (2009) reports that donations to one organization (Disabled War Veterans) doubled (from 18% to 35%) when the solicitation included an individualized gift (gummed personalized address labels). Given the pressure to reciprocate, we should not be surprised that people would seek to avoid such offerings from solicitors. One example Cialdini gives of this is the diversionary efforts that people in public spaces like airports and train stations would take to circumvent solicitors from an eastern religious sect known as the Hare Krishna Society that was very active in the 1960s and 1970s. The reason people were especially eager to avoid representatives of this organization, Cialdini claims, is that they would routinely precede their request with the gift of a flower.This strategy was effective.Whatever discomfort people might feel denying someone’s request, it will be intensified if the requestor has first given them a gift, even one they do not want and is of little value. An especially dramatic case of the pressure to reciprocate and the lengths people will go to avoid this pressure is provided by anthropologist Colin Turnbull’s (1972) ethnography of the Ik people, a hunter-​gatherer society in Uganda. Turnbull found the power of the reciprocity norm to be so formidable in this society that

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despite widespread poverty, hardship, and fraying social bonds, its members still felt the duty to observe it and would take extraordinary measures to avoid it being triggered. One example he gives is of a member of the tribe stealthily repairing a leaky roof at night to ward off offers of help and the ensuing future obligations of reciprocity.

Avoiding Having to Act Responsibly People are motivated to avoid not only situations that constitute unwelcome moral tests (e.g., donation requests) but information that would serve to convert a particular circumstance into an unwanted moral test. Consider a person who knows he has a sexually transmitted disease (STD); perhaps he is even HIV positive. This person faces a conflict concerning future sex partners.The person can refrain from telling any potential partner, thereby endangering the person without their knowledge, a decision that very likely will compromise the person’s moral identity and will be illegal in some jurisdictions. Alternatively, the person can commit to telling potential partners, thereby reducing the likelihood that they will agree to have sex. This could be an uncomfortable choice for many people. But what if the person could avoid finding out whether he was HIV positive in the first place? In this circumstance, the person would not be facing an identity test every time he considers participating in sexual activity with someone. He will have plausible deniability; he will not know for sure whether or not he is HIV positive. True, his decision not to get tested might not sit comfortably with his moral identity, but it will not produce nearly as much discomfort as knowing that he is HIV positive and having sex with someone without telling them. Indeed, many philosophers agree that the former is less morally reprehensible than the latter.13 This calculation may be one reason why over 50% of those who are tested for HIV do not return to find out the result.14 One study that supports this reasoning presented participants with the possibility of getting tested for herpes simplex virus 1(HSV-​1) and virus 2 (HSV-​2) in exchange for $10.15 Both forms of the virus are incurable, but the latter is a sexually transmitted disease. Five percent of participants were willing to forgo a $10 payment to avoid obtaining the test results for HSV-​1, while 16% were willing to sacrifice the same amount for the HSV-​2 test. Moreover, all participants who avoided the HSV-​1 results also avoided the HSV-​2 results, while the converse was true for only two-​thirds of participants. This pattern of avoidance is consistent with HSV-​2 results being more threatening, perhaps because they forced people to confront their responsibility to future sex partners. What should we assume is the motivation of those who avoid getting tested for STDs? Should we expect that, were they to discover they had an STD, they would continue to have sex and simply not disclose their status to their partners? Not necessarily, as there likely will be many people who avoid getting tested because they know they will feel obligated to disclose their status.They simply do not wish

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to be put in that situation. Moreover, sometimes people will avoid learning about a costly outcome even when it will not confront them with a choice, as in the case of a high school football coach who contemplates having a star player tested for a concussion.The coach may try to avoid examining the player, not because he anticipates he will feel guilty playing someone with a concussion, but because he will not be able to play the student. He will be setting himself up to be coerced into something that will be painful to do and that he may well feel resentful about. In all these cases, people may know they will act responsibly; they just do not want to have to.16 As consumers, people sometimes find themselves tempted to bypass identity tests that their purchases could pose for them. For example, when consumers consider buying products, they often have opportunities to learn about the environmental and labor practices of the producing firms. In these situations, there will be little upside to learning that best practices were adhered to, whereas finding out that the firm engages in corrupt practices could impose a considerable downside, as the person’s choice becomes either not purchasing something they might want or purchasing it and feeling guilty doing so. Better to avoid learning about the product’s pedigree, even if that avoidance comes with a financial cost.17 The motivation to elude a costly identity test is strongest among those who most highly value that identity, as they are the ones who feel most compelled to pass it. If people do not have an image as someone who promotes sustainability, taking actions that undermine sustainability does not threaten them; thus, there is little incentive to avoid the knowledge that an otherwise self-​promoting act undermines sustainability.

Avoiding Looking Racist In some cases, being true to your identity means foregoing an act that you otherwise would like to take. In other cases, it means performing an action that you otherwise would not want to take. One example of the strategic avoidance of the latter is found in a telephone study of racial discrimination among registered White conservatives and liberals in New  York City in the early 1970s.18 The study involved the willingness of the randomly dialed respondents to help a Black or a White caller (identifiable based on their dialects) who claimed that his car had broken down on a local highway and that he had just used his last quarter to try to call his mechanic from a public phone booth. The Black and White callers explained that they had misdialed and that they now needed the respondent to help telephone their mechanic for them. White conservative participants helped Black callers less than White callers, whereas White liberals did not discriminate. However, that was not the most remarkable finding. Although liberals helped without regard to race when the need for their assistance was articulated, they, unlike conservatives, were more likely to hang up before learning thoroughly

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of the caller’s need for help when the caller was Black rather than White. One interpretation of this finding is that for White liberals, the request to help a Black person provided more of a moral test than it did for White conservatives, and this led the former to be more likely to help Blacks (thereby passing a moral test when faced with it). However, it also led them to be more likely to escape the situation before the request for help (thereby avoiding being confronted with a moral test that would be costly to either pass or fail).

Summary People do not like to be faced with unwelcome moral tests:  Situations where their identity of themselves as moral either prevents them from doing something in furtherance of another goal or leaves them guilt-​ridden if they pursue the identity-​inconsistent goal. The psychological conflict and conscience grappling that unwelcome tests confront people with are so aversive that they often will seek to avoid these situations, even if doing so is materially costly. Moreover, the people who are most likely to do the responsible thing are the most eager to avoid the situation. Interestingly, when people take steps to evade moral tests altogether, or even to elude conditions that merely increase the magnitude of a moral test, they often know what they are doing. They do not feel good about it, but nevertheless, judge it preferable than putting themselves at risk of facing an even more challenging moral test. People do not want to find themselves in situations where their better angels and their self-​interest will be in conflict.

Notes 1 Dana, Cain, and Dawes (2006) provided the original demonstration of this effect. A subsequent study by Broberg, Ellingsen, and Johannesson (2007) found that 64% of dictators were willing to exit for as little as 82% of their endowment. 2 Andreoni (1990). 3 People do feel somewhat guilty when avoiding potentially threatening information (Noor & Ren, 2011) and are seen as somewhat blameworthy (Van der Weele, 2014). However, they are judged as less bad and treated less badly for ignoring information than for acting contrary to it (Bartling, Engl, & Weber, 2014; Grossman & Van der Weele, 2018). 4 Indeed, research shows that dictators who share the highest amount with the recipient are most likely to choose the exit option (Broberg, Ellingsen, & Johannesson (2007). 5 Cain, Dana, & Newman (2014). 6 Andreoni, Rao, & Trachtman (2011). 7 Della Vigna, List, & Malmendier (2012). 8 Berman & Small (2012). 9 Knuttsson, Martinsson, & Wollbrant (2013). 10 Gneezy, A., Gneezy, Nelson, & Brown (2010). 11 Jang & Chu (2012).

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12 This idea is consistent with Richard Thaler’s (1983) concept of transactional utility, the essence of which is that the value people place on the desired product is not due solely to its price. For example, beach dwellers are willing to pay more for a beer from a fancy hotel than from a beach vendor if they feel that the price set by the beach vendor is a “rip-​off.” Similarly, people might think that it is less painful to be out a certain amount of money or effort when it is expended to avoid an unwelcome test rather than when it is experienced as money given under psychological duress. 13 Hellman (2009); Sarch (2014). 14 Hightow et al., (2005). A survey by Sullivan, Lansky, and Drake (2004) found that many people who do not obtain results of their HIV tests report that it is due to fear. Now, people avoid bad news routinely, but part of the fear could be of the identity test they would face if the test were positive. 15 Ganguly & Tasoff (2017). 16 Norgaard (2006) claims that not knowing allows you to believe that you would have acted differently had you known. In the words of McKown (1993), “the invisible and the non-​existent look very much alike” (p. 39). 17 Ehrich & Irwin (2005); Grossman & van der Weele (2018); Paharia,Vohs, & Deshpandé (2013). 18 Gaertner (1973).

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4 FAILING IDENTITY TESTS

Despite the array of self-​protective resources in our psychological tool kit, preserving our identity as a moral person is not easy. Our moral identities wobble on occasion, whether from failing a moral test, recalling a previously failed one, or even contemplating the failing of a future one. The instability of our moral identity means that the degree of moral self-​satisfaction we experience varies across time. Most consequentially, our moral self-​satisfaction will sometimes fall below the standard that we set for ourselves—​our moral set point.1 We do not have to feel we are a saint to feel morally satisfied, but we do have to feel we meet the standards of a moral person.2 When we do something that compromises that standard and see our self-​image drop below an acceptable level, we seek to restore it to a satisfactory standing. Generally, doing this requires that we generate new evidence of our moral worth. In this sense, our moral identity has an arc that connects the past, present, and future.

Atoning for Failed Identity Tests What behavior helps us restore our private and public image of ourselves? Is it enough that we succeed in not failing other moral tests? Probably not, as this would offer little possibility of redeeming a tarnished image: Passing moral tests is seen as obligatory and something any decent person should do. Trying to assuage your guilt over cheating by avoiding further cheating for the rest of the day is likely to be of limited effectiveness. Such a strategy may forestall increases in the magnitude of your moral identity shortfall, but its potential for reducing it would seem limited. Instead, one must seek what I referred to earlier as moral opportunities.

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Recall that in contrast to moral tests, which confront people with the behavioral means of undermining an identity claim, moral opportunities provide people with the behavioral means of substantiating a moral identity.3 People who fail a moral test and experience the identity stress associated with it will be looking for a self-​image boost. Achieving this boost will require them to do something above and beyond, avoiding further transgressions. Moral opportunities are best for that. Doing something morally good, but not obligatory, best enables you to show that a previous failed moral test “was not you.”

Doing Good After Doing Bad Several research traditions attest to the appeal that moral opportunities have for people who have failed a moral test. One relevant tradition employs what is known as the transgression-​compliance paradigm.4 To illustrate this approach, consider an experiment by psychologists Merrill Carlsmith and Allan Gross (1969). Participants were induced to deliver (supposedly) painful electric shocks to a fellow participant as part of a study that was allegedly examining the effects of punishment on learning (think of the Milgram [1965] experiment). The experience of willfully delivering harm to an innocent person was intended to make the participants feel moral identity distress. Then, participants were approached by the experimenter’s confederate (accomplice), either the one harmed by the participant or a different one. The confederate explained that they were “a member of a committee that was attempting to prevent a freeway from being built through the redwood trees in Northern California.” Their committee, the confederate explained, needed people to call potential signers of a petition to save the trees.Then, the confederate revealed stacks of index cards in bundles of 50 and said that the participant, while under no obligation to help, could greatly assist the committee if they would take any number of cards up to 50. This was not an insignificant ask of participants, as the calls would take one or two minutes each. It is safe to assume that most of the participants, late 1960s male college students, would be sympathetic to the cause—​saving redwood forests—​but still, the request seemed more of a moral opportunity than a moral test, something that would provide a moral boost if acceded to but not a moral blow if declined. Consistent with this interpretation, only 25% of participants agreed to take any cards in the non-​transgression control group. This contrasted with 75% who decided to do so when they previously agreed to shock an innocent confederate. Moreover, the inclination to seize the provided moral opportunity was as high when the person making the request was a third party as when it was the victim of the transgression. Most transgression-​compliance experiments follow the same structure as that just described. First, participants are led to believe that their actions have caused someone (the experimenter or other participant) unjust harm.This harm or transgression, although not caused intentionally, is nevertheless assumed to threaten the

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“transgressor’s” moral identity—​people do not like to see themselves as someone who causes unjust harm to others. Next, participants are provided with an opportunity (ostensibly unrelated to the experiment) to help a person unrelated to the victim of their action. Compared with others who committed no “transgression,” these participants typically comply more readily with the request. The presumed explanation for this result is that inducing participants to undertake a harmful act lowers their moral self-​evaluation below a level sufficient for them to feel comfortable, thereby increasing the attractiveness of opportunities that possess self-​ image redemptive power.5 The transgressions people are induced to commit in these experiments vary greatly, as do the subsequent requests made of them. What characterizes the latter is that they tend to be moral opportunities rather than moral tests. That is, they are requests, like volunteering to make phone calls, that most people do not feel regretful to decline but do feel morally elevated to accept. Indeed, these measures typically elicit helping responses in the control group from less (often far less) than 50% of the participants, which is what you would assume an opportunity rather than a test would elicit.6 Heightening people’s awareness of their transgressions can further increase their desire to seize moral opportunities.7 When visitors to the Portland Art Museum disobeyed a “Please, do not touch” sign, experimenters reprimanded some of them: “Please do not touch the objects. If everyone touches them, they will deteriorate.” Likewise, when visitors to the Portland Zoo fed unauthorized food to the bears, some of them were admonished with “Hey, don’t feed unauthorized food to the animals. Don’t you know it could hurt them?” In both cases, approximately 60% of the presumably now identity-​threatened participants shortly after that offered help to a confederate who had “accidentally” dropped something. Of those not reprimanded, only one-​third helped. The moral identity need-​state of the actor will determine not only the value a moral opportunity has for them, but whether or not they construe a situation as a moral opportunity. Just as people’s capacity for cognitive distortion can decrease the likelihood that they see their circumstances as posing an identity test, so too can it increase the possibility that they see their present circumstances as providing a moral opportunity. Indeed, the incentive that a currently low moral self-​evaluation gives people to imbue the opportunities they encounter with redemptive moral potential may even lead “transgressors” to readily comply with requests of dubious merit. One example of this is the finding that “transgressing” Ohio State University (OSU) undergraduates were more likely than their non-​transgressing peers to agree to sign a petition advocating an increase in OSU tuition.8 It is difficult to imagine that a tuition hike was seen as a worthy cause or that refusing to support the tuition hike would be seen as a moral failure. Rather, participants appeared to be willing to accept a low bar for what constituted an opportunity to redeem themselves.9

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Atoning for Hypocrisy One accusation that threatens a person’s moral identity is that of being a hypocrite. People do not like to be, or to be seen by others as, someone who preaches moral standards that they do not practice. For most people, acting hypocritically constitutes failing a moral test and, consequentially, leaves them looking for moral opportunities to redeem their self-​images. One study that demonstrated this relationship induced hypocrisy concerns among college students by creating a gap between their public support of safe sex and their private actions.10 Half of the college student participants videotaped a speech for local high schools in which they advocated for safe sex. The other half did not. Next, half of the participants were made mindful of their unsafe sexual practices, while the other half were made cognizant of the risky sexual practices of their friends.The former was accomplished by giving the first group a list of ten circumstances that other students had given for not using condoms and asking them to select from this list all the reasons that applied to their failure to use condoms in the past. Those participants who were mindful of their past failures and had made the speech were deemed hypocrites. Following these manipulations, some participants were given the option either to donate some of their experimental pay to a homeless organization or to buy condoms and take informational pamphlets about AIDS. Other participants were given only the first option. Participants in the hypocrisy condition who had the option of taking either action bought significantly more condoms than other participants but did not donate more to the homeless. However, participants in the hypocrisy condition who were not given the option to buy condoms did donate more to the homeless than other participants. For participants whose moral identities were threatened by reminding them of their past unsafe sexual behavior, it appears the opportunity to buy condoms had more redemptive potential than the chance to donate to the homeless. Nevertheless, it appeared still possible for these participants to imbue the latter opportunity with such potential when that was the only moral opportunity available.

Moral Cleansing Effect Another research paradigm with strong parallels to the transgression-​compliance paradigm is known as the moral cleansing paradigm.11 Participants in studies within this tradition do not fail a moral test but merely consider the possibility, or recall previous instances, of doing so. One illustrative study required participants to contemplate the acceptability of taboo trade-​offs, such as paying the poor for harvesting their organs or paying politicians for their votes.12 Participants were not asked to advocate for these practices, but it was presumed that even contemplating making them would discomfit their moral identities. This seemed to be the case because doing so increased participants’ willingness to volunteer to help a political

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action group fighting to prevent the passage of a (fictitious) ballot proposition legalizing the buying and selling of adoption rights for children in need of parents. Another set of studies from the moral cleansing tradition sought to manipulate the security of people’s moral identity by having them recall failed moral tests.13 For example, “recall a time you did something unethical in a work or professional setting.” Compared to those who were asked to recall non-​morally problematic events, these participants were much more likely to say they intended to donate to charity or donate blood in the next week.14

Accused by Others of Failing an Identity Test The judgment as to whether we have failed a moral identity test does not reside solely with ourselves. The words and actions of others are also important. For example, the deeds of another can suggest that what you thought was an unacted-​ upon moral opportunity was a failed moral test.

Accusations That Our Actions Are Immoral An instructive example of this dynamic is provided by a study that presented Dutch participants with the opportunity to express their support for opening a no-​packaging grocery store (i.e., one to which customers brought their own containers).15 Complying with the request was deliberately presented as effortful: It involved following a link to a website where participants would be required to input their personal information, sign an online petition, and share the link to that petition on their social network profile. A majority of participants who were not themselves asked to support the stores, very favorably evaluated both the general concept of a no-​packaging store and a fictitious other (Tim) who undertook the effortful action required by the request. However, only a minority (16%) of participants to whom the appeal of support was made agreed to do so. The gap between the large percentage who saw the support of the no-​package store in favorable terms and the small percentage that actively supported it suggests that participants viewed the request as a moral opportunity, not a moral test. It was something good to do, but not wrong not to do. So how did those who were asked to support the store but declined respond to the compliant Tim? It depended on his explanation for doing so. On the one hand, if Tim’s post suggested support for the concept of the store because he thought such a store would provide less expensive goods and that he “keeps track of expenses as he has a monthly budget that he needs to respect,” they reacted positively to him. On the other hand, they responded negatively to Tim, and the concept of non-​packaging stores, if his post indicated that he did so for “moral and environmental reasons,” with the slogan “let’s go green!” In this latter case, Tim’s post suggested that the failure to support the store was a failed moral test, not a passed-​up moral opportunity.

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Reacting to Others Who Moralize Behavior That We Do Not Because our moral identity is so important to us, it is threatening to have others impugn our behavior as insufficiently moral. As is often the case when threatened, we can be very defensive when others suggest that an action of ours, which we saw as non-​diagnostic of our moral character, was, in fact, very diagnostic and unflatteringly so. One study that shows how people react to those who accuse them of being both morally unenlightened and morally feckless was conducted by psychologist Benoît Monin and his colleagues (2008). Participants either played the role of, or observed another playing the role of, a detective reviewing suspects for a burglary. The “police decision task” was presented on a single sheet with three pictures. It started with a request: Imagine that a burglary has happened in a neighborhood, and the police have apprehended three suspects. Below are brief descriptions of the three suspects. Please consider these carefully and indicate who you think is most likely to be guilty. Below these instructions were three photographs, each accompanied by some information (name, alibi, previous record, possessions when apprehended, action when arrested, occupation), presented in tabular format. Below this information, the instructions went on: Imagine that you are the detective in charge of this case. Please circle the face of the person who you think is most likely to have committed the burglary. In the space below, indicate the reasons for your suspicion. The information provided in the table was designed to incriminate the third suspect, Steven Jones, who had no alibi, had a previous record, was carrying cash and a screwdriver, and was unemployed. Steven Jones was also the only African American in the display; the other two suspects were White. If participants were in the observer condition, they saw the responses of one of two participants who were confederates of the experimenter. Observers in the obedient confederate condition, saw the confederate circle the African American face and write in the box, I think Steven Jones did it because (a) he’s got no real alibi, (b) he’s done it before, and (c) he’s carrying a lot of cash, especially for someone without a job. The screwdriver might have helped to break open a door, etc. Observers in the rebel confederate condition saw the confederate not circle a face, and write in the box, “I refuse to make a choice here—​this task is obviously

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biased … Offensive to make the Black man the obvious suspect. I refuse to play this game.” So how did the reactions of those in the roles of actor and observer compare? Very differently it turns out. Observers described the defiant confederate as more moral than the confederate who obediently accused the lone Black man, and also liked and respected this rebel more. Participants who first selected the suspect themselves (usually the African American) and then saw the alleged responses of the confederate reacted very differently. These participants resented the defiant stance of the rebel and evaluated them negatively. Awareness that people are more moral than we are will not always be threatening. The existence of exceptional people (moral heroes), such as those who commit their lives to serving the poor, does not mean that we are not moral enough. The existence of moral rebels, however, is a different matter. Their action suggests that we could have and should have acted differently. Their actions indicate that we faced an identity test and that we failed it. Derogating them is a form of shooting the messenger.

Generating Identity Tests for Ourselves The dynamic nature of people’s moral identity renders their previous actions relevant in multiple ways. As already seen, when people’s prior actions constitute a failed moral test, it affects both their willingness to avail themselves of a moral opportunity and their likelihood of perceiving a situation as affording a moral opportunity. Also, people’s prior actions affect whether a future circumstance will present itself as a moral test. Consider the act of telling a friend you cannot help them move. Does this action constitute a failed moral test? In thinking about this, you might reasonably say you need more information to give a confident answer. On the one hand, if your friend had moved many times before, and you always had previously helped them, then saying no here would not say something especially negative about you.This might be even truer if your friend had previously refused to help you move. On the other hand, the case for your refusal representing a failed moral test would be enhanced if they had already helped you move; even more so, if you had previously promised to help them and are now reneging. Therefore, historical context can increase or decrease the likelihood that the situation you face constitutes a moral test. In the next chapter, I will discuss how previous actions can negate moral tests. But, here I consider how people, through their previous acts, can author future moral tests.We have already seen one instance of this in our discussion of the reparative action that follows acts of hypocrisy. Failing to practice safe sex may represent a failed moral test for some college students and not for others. Nevertheless, as the study described revealed, the odds that doing so will be experienced as a failed moral test are significantly increased if the student had first advocated safe sex in a public statement directed at high school students.

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Door-​in-​the-​Face  Effect In a well-​known study, psychologist Robert Cialdini and his colleagues (1975) asked college student participants to volunteer as counselors to juvenile offenders for two hours per week for two years.Worthy as the cause may seem to participants, should saying no to this large request compromise the students’ moral standing—​that is, is this a moral test? Probably not. Most people likely would acknowledge that someone could be both a moral person and say no to this request. Therefore, the request would seem a moral opportunity, but not a moral test. That few of the participants saw this request as a moral test is supported by the fact that virtually none of the participants agreed to it. The apparent grounds for disqualifying this request as a moral test is the amount of time commitment it requires. To be sure, there are other possible ways you could try to nullify the request’s status as a moral test, including challenging the worthiness of the cause, the efficacy of counseling juvenile offenders, and the strength of the link between volunteering and moral standing. But, the magnitude of the request is such an apparent disqualifying feature that it is not likely that many people considered other grounds. However, the apparent ease of delegitimizing the moral-​ test status of the request via its magnitude creates a psychological danger. Specifically, were the requestor to reduce the size of the appeal to a more reasonable level, say to serve as chaperones for a one-​day visit to the zoo with young offenders, those who refused the first request would be caught in a psychological trap. With that aspect of the request that negated its status as a moral test now removed, people’s justification for saying no, too, has been lost. So, what happened when participants were presented with the smaller request? If they had not been offered the first, unreasonable request, 17% agreed. Even this smaller request, by itself, did not seem to be considered a moral test. Most people acted as though they could say no with impunity.This was not the case with those who had first refused a more significant request. Their agreement rate was 50%, suggesting that for them, the act of declining the first request increased the difficulty of saying no to the second. Had they refused the second request, they would have refused two appeals, not one, with the second one lacking the feature (time commitment) that allowed them to reject the first so comfortably. The phenomenon where the act of previously refusing a large request increases people’s willingness to subsequently comply with a smaller request is called the door-​in-​the-​face effect (DITFE).16 This effect capitalizes on the conversion of a moral opportunity into a moral test. Because the first request is unreasonably large, refusing it (closing the door in the face of the requestor) does not undermine a person’s claim to be a good person. However, the legitimacy of the claim that the initial refusal does not make you a bad person is put to the test by the subsequent, more reasonable request. Good people may be justified in rejecting unreasonable demands, but they are much less justified in rejecting more reasonable follow-​ up requests. By not complying with the second more reasonable request, they

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would invalidate the story with which they comforted themselves for their previous inaction. Interestingly, we have here a situation where people’s need to be consistent manifests itself not in behavioral consistency (consistently complying or declining) but in psychological consistency (consistency in the accounts they generate). That people can be trapped by the accounts they give themselves for why their previous actions did not constitute failed moral tests has been shown in another study by behavioral scientist Stephanie Lin and her colleagues (2017). This study provided participants with the opportunity to donate a portion of the money they earned as research participants to the American Cancer Society (ACS) or keep it for themselves. Participants were told that if they did choose to allocate their payment to the ACS there was, depending on the condition, a 70% or a 100% chance that the donation would actually go the charity. Previous research had shown that people often seize upon the uncertainty that a donation would go to the charity to not make that donation.17 Accordingly, the researchers predicted that those for whom the choice to donate would only result in a donation 70% of the time would feel more justified in not making this choice than those for whom decision to donate was guaranteed to result in a donation.Very few participants in either the 70% or 100% condition chose to donate (6.00% versus 8.74%). At this point, the experimenter shifted the story for the participants in the 70% condition.The experimenter told them that for “protocol reasons,” there was now a 100% (not a 70%) chance their decision to donate to the ACS would result in the money going to the ACS. Then, the participants were asked to make a second (Time 2) choice between those options. Those previously provided with a salient excuse for not seeing the request as a moral test (a 30% chance that even if they chose to donate it would not go to the charity) were over three times (26% versus 8%) more likely to give when the uncertainty had been removed than were those for whom there was no uncertainty at either time. It appears that, although the uncertainty of their donation going to charity did not affect their likelihood of donating at Time 1 (virtually no one gave), it did change the story they told themselves for why they were not donating. In contrast, whatever the reason those in the 100% certainty condition seized upon for not contributing at Time 1, it continued to be a legitimate reason for not donating at Time 2 as well.

Foot-​in-​the-​Door  Effect Any time a person encounters a behavioral choice where one action seems more consistent with a past act than another, they will face a test. This is exemplified by the phenomenon known as the foot-​in-​the-​door effect (FITDE), where inducing people to comply with a small request increases the likelihood that they will comply subsequently with a more significant, related request. This effect differs from the DITFE in that here we see that compliance with a small initial request

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(not noncompliance with a sizable initial request) leads to compliance with a subsequent large request (not compliance with a subsequent small request). In an early demonstration of the FITDE, homemakers were asked if they would put a little sticker in the window of their house or car promoting either protection of the environment or safe driving.18 They were later asked if they would be willing to display a large billboard sign in their front yard with the same message. The compliance rate was three times as high if they had first complied with the small request.19 By the first act of compliance, people did not explicitly commit to complying with a more significant future appeal. Nonetheless, their initial action increased the (negative) self-​image consequences of denying the subsequent request. For the person who had earlier complied with a smaller request, the second request represents not an opportunity to show that they are a helpful, cooperative person, but a test of their claim to have such an identity that they made by their earlier actions.

Summary People’s moral identities can be damaged or threatened easily. When their moral identity has been threatened, people are quick to seize upon moral opportunities as a means of countering the threat. People’s eagerness to find a moral opportunity when their identity has been challenged not only makes them vigilant for such situations, but imbues them with the motivation to see those situations available to them as moral opportunities. In addition to constituting failed identity tests that prompt them to take reparative steps, people’s past actions can also form the groundwork for future identity tests. Actions create the latter when they represent a claim by a person that can be undermined if the person does not take consistent actions in the future. For example, helping someone can sometimes lead to compliance with subsequent more substantial requests because the second request represents a test of the claim made by the first act of help. It is also the case that saying no to an initial unreasonable request can sometimes increase the likelihood that a second more reasonable request will be complied with because the second request represents a test of the person’s initial claim about the identity irrelevance of the earlier refusal.

Notes 1 Nisan & Horenczyk (1990); Nisan (2004); Sachdeva, Iliev, & Medin (2009). 2 Moral philosophers have argued that it is reasonable not to want to be morally perfect with all the sacrifices moral perfection seems to require (see Dorsey, 2010; Wolf, 1982). 3 The distinction between moral opportunities and moral tests bears similarities to the difference that Janoff-​Bulman, Sheikh, and Hepp (2009) made between proscriptive and prescriptive morality. Proscriptive morality focuses on positive outcomes and on what you should do, with the promise of moral credit. Prescriptive morality focuses on adverse

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outcomes and on what you should not do, with the threat of moral blame. However, moral opportunities are neither only instances of prescriptive morality nor are moral tests merely instances of proscriptive morality. Moral tests and moral opportunities can both involve either prescriptive or proscriptive elements. The moral test that is failed by the act of cheating on an exam involves proscriptive morality, whereas the moral test that is failed by letting a colleague’s racist joke go unchallenged involves a prescriptive morality. In a parallel fashion, the moral opportunity afforded by the decision to discontinue buying products from countries with poor labor conditions involves a proscriptive morality. In contrast, the moral opportunity given by the decision to seek out a charity to donate to involves a prescriptive morality. It may be true that proscriptive morality more often leads to tests and prescriptive morality to opportunities, but the examples provided above show that the concepts are meaningfully distinguished. 4 Freedman, Wallington, & Bless (1967); McMillen & Austin (1971). 5 Sachdeva et al. (2009). 6 O’Keefe (2000). 7 Katzev, Edelsack, Steinmetz, Walker, & Wright (1978). 8 Brock & Becker (1966). 9 Importantly, it is not only following threats to their moral identity that leads people to take corrective actions. As we will see in Chapter 7, males whose masculine identity is threatened also will act to restore that identity (Willer, Rogalin, & Conlon, 2013). 10 Stone, Aronson, Crain, Winslow, & Fried (1994). 11 See Brañas-​Garza, Bucheli, Espinosa, & García-​Muñoz (2013) for a review. 12 Tetlock, Kristel, Elson, Green, & Lerner (2000). 13 Jordan, Mullen, & Murnighan (2011). 14 Cheating in experimental games has also been found to lead people to contribute more to public good games (Secilmis, 2018). 15 Zane, Irwin, & Reczek (2016). 16 Cialdini et al. (1975). 17 Exley (2019). 18 Freedman & Fraser (1966) 19 For other demonstrations of the FITD, see Burger (1999); Schwanwald, Bizrnan & Raz (1983); and Burger & Caldwell (2003).

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5 NEUTRALIZING IDENTITY TESTS

The last chapter described how our actions can generate, often unwittingly, future moral tests for us. Past actions can also negate or neutralize circumstances that, absent those actions, would be experienced as a moral test. How and why this happens is the topic of this chapter. In particular, this chapter will demonstrate that past identity-​consistent actions can increase the comfort people have when engaged in behaviors that they would otherwise see as identity inconsistent. Being confronted with an unwelcome moral test is an unpleasant experience for people and motivates them to minimize its identity relevance or at least, to see its failure as not seriously compromising their moral identity. I detailed some of the ways people accomplish this in previous chapters, including finding moral wiggle room in the meaning of the action and dodging the test altogether. Casting their minds back to virtuous past actions also can serve to protect people against the identity threat posed by tempting deeds. While the last chapter described how recalling previous actions could constrain people to act in identity-​consistent ways, this chapter shows that such recall also can liberate people from the pressure to act in identity-​consistent ways. People view the present via the past for better or worse.

Moral Licensing The recognition that they are facing a situation relevant to their self-​identity often prompts people to entertain some form of the following reflection: “What will taking the different options available to me say about the type of person that I am and want to be?” This reflection inevitably directs people to their past actions, for the meaning people assign to their present possible acts depends on those previous ones that come to mind. In the last chapter, we saw how past actions could

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increase the likelihood that people will see the immediate choice as a moral test. Here, we will see how they can decrease the possibility that they will see the current decision as a moral test.

When Past Action Serves as a Corroborating Defense Witness Consider someone who sees themselves an egalitarian facing the following dilemma. Imagine that you are the police chief of a small town in a rural area of the U.S. Historically, the population has been exclusively White, and attitudes toward other ethnicities tend to be unfavorable. As much as you regret it, you know this is especially the case within your unit. You cannot help overhearing racist jokes coming from people you otherwise consider excellent officers. In fact, a couple of years ago, an African American patrolman joined your unit, and within a year, he quit, complaining about hostile working conditions. You are doing what you can to change attitudes; but, your main objective is that the police force should do its job, and so far, it has been rather effective. You do not want to provoke any major unrest within the ranks. The time has come to recruit a new officer. As a general rule, officers need to be responsible and trustworthy and show quick intelligence that enables them to make split-​second decisions in crises. Recent scandals have also highlighted the need for a high level of integrity, resistance to corruption, a mild manner, and a calm temper. You have just received applications from the new graduates of the local police academy. You wonder whether ethnicity should be a factor in your choice. Do you feel that this specific position (described above) is better suited for any particular ethnicity? It might seem that when answering this question, an egalitarian would take the position that the job is not better suited to one ethnicity over another. But the scenario was written in a way to tempt people, even egalitarians, to feel concerned about how comfortable an African American would be in this job. Competence aside, it just does not seem like an African American is a good fit for this racially hostile environment. We might expect an egalitarian considering what to do in this situation to ponder the identity ramifications, both private and public ones, of saying anything other than the job is equally suited to all ethnicities. The more secure they are in their identity as egalitarian, the less identity threat they will incur by expressing the opinion that the job is even a little better suited to a White candidate. Indeed, if they could find a way to bolster their egalitarian identity, they might be able to express their genuine opinion and retain their confidence in their identity. One avenue they could pursue is to take stock of their credentials as an egalitarian. The

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more evidence they can find that supports their egalitarian self-​image, the more willing they should be to speak their mind. Past evidence of egalitarian actions on their part would seem critical in this regard. In one experimental test of this reasoning, researchers presented participants with two job recruitment scenarios, the second one being the police recruitment scenario described above.1 Before submitting this scenario to participants, the researchers presented them with a job recruitment task that asked them to indicate which of five applicants they would choose for a starting position in a large consulting firm. They briefly described each candidate by using a picture, name, college, grade point average (GPA), and major. In all conditions, they designed the fourth applicant as the most attractive: The applicant had graduated from a prestigious institution, had majored in economics, and had the highest GPA. The manipulated variable was the ethnicity of that star applicant. In the nonracist credentials condition, the applicant was an African American man; in the no-​credentials control condition, the applicant was a White man. All four other applicants were White men. Participants overwhelmingly chose the fourth candidate, and consistent with the reasoning outlined above, those for whom this candidate was African American were more likely to indicate that a White candidate would be more suitable for the position in the subsequent police recruit scenario. Having chosen an African American candidate recently over four White candidates left participants secure enough in their egalitarian identity to express a more authentic response to the second scenario. Finally, keeping my promise to mention research that provides direct evidence that a particular effect was directed toward a private rather than a public audience, I note that the credential effects described in the police recruit study occurred even when the participant was the only one who knew of their earlier nonracist actions. Participants may have been concerned with the impression that their behavior conveyed to the experimenter, but they appeared primarily concerned with the significance of their acts on their private image.2 Psychologist Daniel Effron and his colleagues (2009) obtained a similar finding in the context of the 2008 U.S. presidential election. Before the election, White U.S. participants—​all supporters of African American candidate Barack Obama—​ responded to the same police force scenario. Only participants who were allowed to express their support for Obama before reacting to this scenario described the police job as better suited for Whites than for Blacks. It seemed that endorsing Obama provided participants with nonracist credentials that they could point to when reflecting on whether favoring Whites would signal that they were racist. The credential of having voted for Obama functioned like a character witness on whom the actors could call to testify that their subsequent dubious behavior (expressing the view that the job is better suited to Whites) was not racist. The previous nonracist act reassured both the actor and presumably observers, that the opinion they expressed stemmed from sympathy for African Americans, not from racism.

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It is instructive to view the moral licensing effect (the tendency of prior identity-​ bolstering acts to enable people to be more comfortable taking potential identity-​ threatening actions) in the context of a nondiscrimination legal defense known as the same-​actor doctrine defense.3 To illustrate the application of this doctrine, consider the following scenario. Betty, a computer programmer, works for a technology company in Silicon Valley. Her manager, Mike, is in charge of staffing decisions and hired her three years ago. During Betty’s tenure at the technology company, she worked steadfastly at the company, earning praise and consistent positive annual reviews. As a result, Betty applied for a promotion to a supervisory position. The technology company has very few women in supervisory positions. Mike ultimately chose to promote Carl as a supervisor, even though Carl was technically less qualified. However, Mike believed that Carl would be better at leading a team of computer programmers. Now, assume that Betty brought a suit against Mike for discrimination. How do you think the court might view her case? It might surprise you that many federal courts applying the same-​actor doctrine would reach a strong inference of nondiscrimination in favor of Mike against Betty. The grounds for this inference would be a “commonsense” understanding of how humans behave. Specifically, the reasoning behind the same-​person doctrine is that Mike could not be engaging in discrimination because he previously acted in a nondiscriminatory way. This logic relies on the economic formulation of discrimination as a “taste” or preference for one gender or one race over another. Presumably, having once demonstrated (by hiring Betty) that he had no taste for discrimination, it seems unreasonable (contrary to common sense) that Mike’s second act (not promoting Betty) could have represented a taste for discrimination. This defense, and the analogy on which it is based, would seem highly psychologically naive, as the moral licensing research suggests that Mike may be more likely to have engaged in discrimination because of having previously not discriminated. That is, by first hiring Betty, Mike would be less likely to inhibit bias when considering whether or not to promote her.

When Past Action Serves as a Get-​Out-​of-​Jail-​Free Card Providing a lens to see ambiguous behaviors is not the only route through which past moral behavior may license subsequent immoral behavior. Previous positive actions can also offset present identity-​compromising behavior. In this view, moral behavior provides you with moral credits (not moral credentials) that serve to balance out subsequent immoral acts, conceptualized as moral debits. Both the self and others may permit immoral behavior so long as moral credits accrued by past good deeds balance it.4 The moral credits model (where past moral behaviors entitle people to later immoral behavior) and the moral credentials model (where past moral behavior helps clarify the meaning of ambiguous later acts) offer different accounts of when and why moral licensing occurs.

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The critical assumption of the moral credits model is that previous moral actions make morally questionable deeds more permissible not by changing their perceived meaning (as do moral credentials) but by providing the actor with moral capital to offset that spent by immoral acts. They reduce the magnitude of the identity damage that a transgression produces, not its status as a transgression. According to this form of conscience accounting, people who have acquired moral credits feel they have earned the right to both commit a transgression and continue to feel good enough about their moral character.5 The psychology underlying the moral credits model is analogous to the practice of purchasing carbon offsets to minimize your environmental impact. Money spent on carbon offsets contributes to projects that decrease the amount of CO2 emitted or already in the atmosphere—​for example, by funding the planting of trees. The purchase of a carbon offset can allow you to do something environmentally harmful, such as taking a transcontinental flight, while keeping your net environmental impact neutral. The purchase of a carbon offset psychologically licenses a traveler to do something morally questionable, like contributing to carbon emissions, while maintaining a positive view of their morality. Environmentally and morally, carbon offsets do not change the meaning of a transcontinental flight: The flight still emits carbon, and from an environmental perspective, it still represents a morally questionable behavior. Instead, the offsets balance out whatever harm the trip causes to the environment and the traveler’s sense of moral worth. When people who possess moral credits commit a transgression, they still will be perceived (by themselves and others) as transgressing. Nevertheless, their transgression will seem more permissible than it would have without credits. Evidence for the moral credits model comes from the field as well as the laboratory.6 In one experimental study, participants initially searched an online store and filled a basket with $25 of products they wanted. The store was either a conventional online store or one with a high share of green products (green store).7 Afterward, participants in what they thought was another experiment, answered a set of questions with diverse payoffs for providing the answers. Participants could increase their financial reward by lying, but were encouraged not to through the admonition that the researchers would use the results in future studies. The evidence revealed that participants who shopped in the green store were more willing to provide deceitful answers and to steal money when they anonymously took their payoff out of an envelope. Having built up their moral credits through green purchases, participants seemed more comfortable failing subsequent moral tests. Another study showed that asking people to recall instances of good deeds led them to cheat more in the die-​tossing game described in Chapter 2. Specifically, it led them to underreport the number of non-​rewarded outcomes (sixes) they rolled so that they could make more money.8 Finally, researchers found that people were more likely to violate a no-​smart-​phone policy at work if they recently had been asked to recall something prosocial they had done at work.9

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An investigation of moral credits in daily life found results parallel to those found in the laboratory.10 Participants in this study indicated five times per day whether they committed, were the target of, witnessed, or learned about a moral or immoral act within the past hour. The results showed that people who committed a moral act had a more substantial likelihood of committing an immoral act later that day. People appeared to balance their moral and immoral acts within each day. However, people’s balancing need not be confined to the same day. The finding that electric car owners report feeling less of a moral obligation to do other pro-​ environmental activities suggests that a single good deed (e.g., buying an energy-​ efficient car) may have a long-​term effect on their sense of what they can do with identity impunity.11 The context in which moral credits have drawn the most interest is where successful efforts to decrease resource use of one type (e.g., water use) has resulted in an increase of resource use of another kind (e.g., electricity use).12 One relevant study targeted 200 residents in a large apartment complex. Their water use and electricity use were established first over a period of two weeks. After this, the treatment group received weekly feedback on their water use, their neighbors’ water use, and a water-​saving device. The results showed that after seven weeks, the residents who received weekly feedback on their water consumption lowered their water use (6% on average). However, they simultaneously increased their electricity consumption by 5.6% compared with control subjects.13 People seemed to feel that they had built up moral credit from their resource conservation in one domain that entitled them to use resources more freely in another. People seem especially prone to aggregate across transactions in public goods situations. When it comes to contributing to a good cause or a public good, it is common for people to evaluate themselves in terms of whether or not they have done their part. Researchers refer to this tendency as the contribution ethic.14 This way of thinking especially applies when people deem it impossible for them or any one person to address the need, and where their obligation is merely to do their part. Indeed, doing more than their share may make them feel like a sucker. Here, performing a prosocial act because it fulfills their contract as a good citizen, exempts them from further contribution. Having bought cookies from one Girl Scout, people not only do not feel an increased obligation to purchase cookies from other Girl Scouts, but they feel less obligation to do so.The first act constitutes the discharge of an obligation made by a claim (that of being a good community member), not the basis of a new claim (to support the Girl Scouts). Similarly, a military reservist who signs up for a tour of duty is not laying down a marker that commits them to sign up for more tours of duty. They are just fulfilling what they see as an obligation of an identity claim. People also seem to carve out safe spaces for themselves: times or situations that simply do not count toward the standing of their moral identity. The slogan “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas” captures this phenomenon. It suggests that what happens there does not factor into a person’s moral account. Similarly, people

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who are sensitive to their carbon footprint often exempt their behavior on their vacations and use more than average.15 They grant themselves dispensation for what they do there. We saw earlier that a similar exemption seems to apply when people are intoxicated. Even people who are not drunk, but think they are, have a lower threshold for violating their moral code, suggesting they feel they can discount any action that occurs under the influence.

How Do Credentials and Credits Differ? Empirically distinguishing moral credits from moral credentials is not easy. In both cases, performing positive acts leads to a reduced probability of subsequent positive actions and an increased probability of later negative acts. One means of distinguishing between credentials and credits pertains to their longevity. Efforts that provide moral credentials have more extended staying power than those that offer moral credits. Moral credentials can be drawn upon repeatedly to testify to a person’s moral standing. In contrast, moral credits deplete with use, and like drawn-​down bank accounts, eventually need to be replenished. A second respect in which moral credentials and moral credits differ is the domains in which they most naturally function. Aggregating acts with different moral valences, as occurs in the case of moral credits, but not moral credentials, are not equally permissible across all identities. While acts of dishonesty may be offset by prior deeds of honesty or by other good deeds, offsetting acts of racism will not be as simple. Previous acts of egalitarianism do not legitimate acts of racism (racism is never justified): They can, however, buy the actor the benefit of the doubt about the meaning of potentially racist acts. One feature that moral credits and credentials share is that people can anticipate their needs and thus strategically acquire them before they face a potential moral test. People will build up their supply of moral credits when they anticipate being in a situation where they will need to spend some. For example, people may be more likely to give to charity if they think they might act dishonestly later. They also will be motivated to acquire credentials in advance of taking an action that others might interpret negatively. For example, Whites who anticipate that they will have to decide between a Black and a White job candidate, are motivated to act in ways that make them appear more racially sensitive.16 Majority group members also choose to strategically refer to close associations with minorities when warned of a future situation in which they might appear racist.17

When Does Past Action Liberate You and When Does It Bind You? The attentive reader will note that I have presented evidence showing both that initial actions can free people to act differently in the future, and at other times,

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commit them to behave similarly in the future. The obvious question is: When does behaving morally increase the likelihood that people will act morally in the future, and when does it decrease the probability?18 The honest answer is that it is not entirely clear, but I will offer some thoughts. In addressing this question, a good place to start is with a consideration of what identity claims the person sees their first action as making. Specifically, when does the person’s first act constitute a claim that commits them to similar behaviors in the future? One possibility is that people will be disposed to act consistently when the first action defines them as embracing a particular moral identity. Psychologists Jerry Burger and David Caldwell (2003) tested this idea by seeing if attaching identity labels to people following their acts increases the likelihood that they will act behaviorally (and identity) consistently in the future. They found it did. Labeling someone a “helper” following an act of help increases the likelihood that the person will help in the future. Likewise, exhorting someone to be a “voter” (rather than simply to vote) increases the likelihood that someone will vote in the future.19 So, too, does exhorting someone to be a “water saver” (rather than simply to save water) increase the likelihood of them conserving water. It appears identity labels act as guides to people about both what they “do” and what they “should do.”When people acquire the identity of helper or voter, it means that their failure to consistently help or vote will represent a failed identity test and produce discomfort that those without that identity would not feel. Economist Ayelet Gneezy and her colleagues (2012) employed another approach to show that making the first action identity relevant increases the likelihood of consistency. These researchers varied the cost of the initial prosocial act and found that performing a high-​cost initial act was more likely than a low-​cost initial action to lead to future prosocial behavior. The reason proposed was that the costliness of performing the first act required participants to label themselves as helpful people, with the result that subsequent situations involving prosocial behavior became identity tests for them. Other research, too, has found that identity salience increases consistency rather than licensing.20

Positive versus Non-​Negative Identities Another account for when past behavior constrains people to act consistently and when it frees them to act differently pertains to the nature of the identity claim that is in play. Identity claims fall into two categories: those that affirm a positive identity (I am egalitarian) and those that negate a negative identity (I am not a racist). What signifies evidence for these two types of claims is different. Specifically, interpreting your action to refute a feared negative identity (e.g., I am not stingy) is more likely to be liberating and less likely to be binding for the future than is interpreting it to affirm a valued positive identity (e.g., I am generous). Likewise, embracing an identity as an environmentally progressive person requires demonstrating a higher level of environmental care than merely embracing an identity as someone who is “not uncaring about the environment.”

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Affirmative identity claims carry heavier burdens than negative identity claims. For example, the claim that you are egalitarian is stronger than the claim that you are nonracist. One instance of non-​egalitarianism tarnishes an egalitarian identity more than it does a nonracist identity. People also will interpret fewer actions as calling into question a person’s identity as a nonracist than their identity as an egalitarian. Moreover, acts that serve to liberate people who aspire merely to be nonracists will not have this effect and could have the opposite effect on people who want to be egalitarians. If you are committed to affirming a positive identity, as opposed merely to refuting a negative identity, you will be less likely to think in terms of a credit balance. (Few would say: I have been egalitarian enough today). One way to evaluate the role that identity plays in whether past behavior liberates or constrains people is to look at those studies that have categorized people by the strength of their identities and see whether they differ in their tendency to act consistently or inconsistently. One study found that the strength of participants’ self-​reported pro-​environmental identity affected the impact that imagining buying environmentally friendly shoes or clothing (versus control non-​green products) had on their later expression of pro-​environment emotions, concerns, and intentions.21 Participants who had a robust pro-​ environmental identity were not affected by the green purchase: They always expressed environmentally friendly intents or concerns. But after individuals with a weak pro-​ environmental identity chose the green products, as opposed to conventional products, they voiced lower green intentions and interests, suggesting a licensing pattern. That low identifiers showed licensing effects suggests that they felt that their green purchase, though maybe not validating the claim that they were “pro-​environment,” had at least validated the claim that they were not “anti-​ environment,” which was what they cared most about. A similar finding emerged in a study that investigated how a pro-​environmental identity influenced participants’ willingness to donate to an environmental charity following visualization of engaging in voluntary versus mandatory pro-​ environmental behaviors.22 When the initial response was voluntary (instead of compulsory), high identifiers did not demonstrate licensing effects, whereas low identifiers did. Finally, people who endorsed the statement “I am an environment-​ friendly person” were more likely to show licensing impacts than those who supported the stronger statement “I am an environmental activist.”23 The different obligations that identities commit people to may be one reason why fewer people in a Gallup poll described themselves as environmentalists in 2016 than did in 1991 (42% vs. 78%).24 Despite very likely engaging in more pro-​environmental practices in 2016 than 1991, people may have found that the more demanding standards for being true to an identity as an environmentalist in 2016 than 1991 made it too costly to claim that identity. Earlier I  discussed a study that found that allowing (versus not allowing) research participants an opportunity to express that they would vote for Obama in the 2008 U.S.  presidential election licensed them to favor a White over

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an African American community organization in a resource allocation task. A follow-​up study by the researchers found that this was only true for those who had lower identification with egalitarian values. By contrast, individuals who had higher identification with egalitarianism (i.e., scored lower on the modern racism scale) showed a marginally significant effect in the opposite direction (consistency).25 To the extent that those with a low commitment to egalitarianism cared more about being nonracist than about being egalitarian, their intention to vote for Obama validated this claim. They could now withhold support for Blacks on the subsequent measure and still feel that they had evidence they were not racist. In contrast, those who made the stronger claim that they were egalitarian were not granted similar freedom to succumb to their temptation to support the White organization over the Black one. Having registered their intention to support Obama allowed them to back a White organization over a Black one and not feel racist, but it was not enough to make them feel egalitarian. Positive identity claims are probably made at the time of the first action, that is, “this shows me to be someone who cares about being a good citizen.” Weaker, negative identity claims may be more likely made in retrospect when people are looking for reasons not to worry about taking a morally suspect action (i.e., “Can I point to anything that would make doing this less of an indictment of me?”).

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Revisiting the Foot-​in-​the-​Door  Effect Earlier I reported a study that found that homeowners who agreed to put a small sticker in their window advocating “safe driving or “saving the environment” were more likely to agree to put a sizable billboard bearing the same message on their lawn than those who were not asked to put up the small sticker in the first place.26 I previously said that agreeing to the first request transformed the second request into an identity test. In light of the research reviewed in this chapter, however, we can ask why the first act was not liberating.Why, for example, would people, when approached for the second request, not just say, “No, I did my part for the cause earlier?” One feature of studies demonstrating the foot-​in-​the-​door effect is that the second request is always more significant than the first.You might assume that the result would be even more substantial if it were smaller or equal. But, maybe not. It is conceivable that the effect may depend on the second request being more significant than the first. The logic behind this analysis is that only a larger subsequent request would represent an identity test. People’s refusal to comply with a second, more substantial request undermines their desire to affirm an identity claim by the first act of compliance.27 They cannot persuasively say, “I did my part” because “your part” was so small in relation to the request now being asked of you. That you would not comply with the second request gives the lie to any identity significance you attached to the initial act. Moreover, not to conform to the latter, more significant

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request shows you to be a fair-​weather friend to the cause. Saying no to the second request is a failed loyalty test. Yes, you are committed to promoting safe driving, but only to a limited extent and apparently not as much as those others who do agree to the second request. If compliance with the first request were taken as support only for a weak claim (I am not unmoved by this cause), you might well have found licensing, not consistency. Not complying with the second request would not invalidate this weaker claim.

Summary The previous chapter showed how past acts can imbue future situations with the status of identity tests that otherwise would not have that status. This chapter described the capacity of past actions to transform the status of future circumstances from identity tests to non-​identity tests. I identified two contexts when this occurs. The first is when previous actions generate credits for people regarding some identity claim that leaves them secure in their claim even when they take actions that undermine it. For example, having acquired credits as someone with self-​control, people are entitled to relax their restraint in a future situation without putting their claim to being self-​controlled at risk. The second circumstance when past actions negate future identity tests is when they provide a benign lens through which a potentially identity-​incongruent deed is viewed. Previous acts, in this case, do not provide identity credits that can be spent down, but instead, a character witness who can defend ambiguous actions against the charge of being identity inconsistent. For example, prior actions of egalitarianism can embolden people to take steps that could be interpreted as inconsistent with an egalitarian identity.

Notes

1 Monin & Miller (2001). 2 Monin & Miller (2001). 3 Quintanilla & Kaiser (2016). 4 Jordan, Mullen, & Murnighan (2011); Nisan, 1991; Sachdeva, Iliev, & Medin (2009); Zhong, Ku, Lount Jr., & Murnighan (2010). 5 Gneezy, U., Imas, & Madarász (2014). 6 List & Fatemeh (2017). 7 Mazar & Zhong (2010). 8 Clot, Grolleau, & Ibanez (2014). 9 Blanken, van de Ven, & Zeelenberg (2015). 10 Hofmann, Wisneski, Brandt, & Skitka (2014). 11 Klöckner, Nayum, & Mehmetoslu (2013). 12 Truelove, Carrico, Weber, Raimi, & Vandenbergh (2014). 13 Tiefenbeck, Staake, Roth, & Sachs (2013). 14 Kahneman et al. (1993); Thøgersen & Crompton (2009).

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15 Dolnicar & Grun (2009). 16 Bradley-​Geist, King, Skorinko, Hebl, & McKenna (2010); Merritt et al. (2012). 17 Bradley-​Geist et al. (2010). 18 See Mullen and Monin (2016) for a review of the evidence. 19 Bryan, Walton, Rogers, & Dweck (2011). 20 Mullen and Monin (2016). 21 Meijers,Verlegh, Noordewier, & Smit (2015). 22 Clot et al. (2013). 23 Kashima, Paladino, & Margetts (2014). 24 Brick & Lai (2018). 25 Effron et al. (2009). 26 Freedman & Fraser (1966). 27 This account is different from what is known as the self-​perception theory account (Scott, 1977), which says that you infer from the initial act that you are a helpful, socially conscious person, and thus, you act out your understanding of yourself rather than defend a claim about yourself.

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6 PASSING IDENTITY TESTS

The previous chapters show that maintaining a positive self-​ image requires considerable resourcefulness. People must avoid failing moral identity tests that would undermine their confidence in their status as a moral actor. Moreover, when they do fail a moral identity test, they must retrieve evidence of past virtuousness so as to allay the identity concerns raised by that failure.When they cannot retrieve sufficient evidence of their virtuousness to ward off the threat produced by a failed identity test, they must restore their self-​regard by seizing one or more moral opportunities. This chapter delves more deeply into the demands of people’s moral identity. In particular, it addresses three issues: (a) How much good must people do to satisfy the claims of their moral identity? (b) How much evidence of goodness in people’s recent past or activated in memory is necessary to lessen the threat posed by a potential identity test? (c) How much good must people do after a failed identity test to restore their moral identity?

How Much Moral Satisfaction Is Enough? The attractiveness that a moral opportunity has for people depends first and foremost on the security they have in their moral identity at the time they confront it. The lower people’s security, the higher the value of any available moral opportunity. Even those secure in their moral identity, however, may find some moral opportunities attractive, especially if they involve a low cost. One question to ask in this regard is how the amount of social benefit provided by an opportunity affects its attractiveness. Does doing a greater amount of good make us feel better about ourselves than doing a lesser amount? Interestingly, research suggests that it

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may not. At least, research shows that the attractiveness a moral opportunity has for people does not much depend on the amount of good it yields. Evidence that the appeal of a moral opportunity does not depend on its pro-​ social potential comes from research examining the value people put on public goods that vary in magnitude. Consider the value to the public of reducing the incidence of all forms of cancer as compared to just one type of cancer; or, the importance of providing famine relief to all countries in Africa as compared to only one African country. It would seem indisputable that the amount of good provided by reducing all forms of cancer and providing famine relief to all African countries is higher than the more limited alternatives. It follows from this that if people want to do good, they should invest more in the more expansive public good.That is, they should prefer to donate money to efforts designed to reduce all cancers and support famine relief to all African countries than to more restricted efforts. This is not what happens, however. Indeed, one well-​known study showed that the amount of money that people were willing to pay to reduce all forms of cancer or to pay to provide famine relief to all countries in Africa, was not appreciably higher than the amount they were willing to pay to reduce one form of cancer or to provide famine relief in one African country.1 One interpretation of this finding is that people value contributing some public good but do not attach appreciably higher value to providing more public good. The evaluation of public goods is especially prevalent in the environmental context; and here, too, there is evidence that the appeal of contributing to the public good is not highly sensitive to the scope of that good. For example, the amount of money that people are willing to provide to clean up ten polluted rivers is not substantially higher than the amount they will contribute to clean up one polluted river.2 What is more, the amount of money that people are willing to provide annually to save 200,000 migratory water fowl is not appreciably more significant than the amount they are willing to contribute to rescue 20,000 birds or even 2,000 birds.3 People show similar scope insensitivity with respect to the effort they are prepared to expend to benefit a charity.4 One relevant experiment required participants to squeeze a hand dynamometer with payments (either to the participant or a charity) tied to the force recorded by the dynamometer. The analysis yielded two main results. First, when the stakes were low (the possibility of earning .35 cents), individuals exerted more effort for a charity than for themselves. Second, increasing the incentives (the possibility of earning $12) increased the effort participants used when they were the beneficiary but not when it was a charity. The latter finding suggests that making a large amount of money for charity is not more attractive than making a little money for charity. This same point was made by an experiment that looked at the influence that the proportion of a product’s price that went to charity had on consumers’ desire to buy it. The study found that consumers’ willingness to purchase the product increased

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when some of the money went to charity, but was insensitive to the amount that went to charity.5 People’s insensitivity to the amount of good that their actions produce may indicate that the warm glow or identity satisfaction people derive from doing good does not depend on the amount of good they do. A second possibility is that people’s gratification may increase with the amount of social good they provide, but at a certain point, the increases in satisfaction they derive from higher contributions become less than those they could obtain from purchasing something else with their money. For example, people’s unwillingness to donate more money to save 20,000 birds than 2,000 birds may reflect their belief that they would derive more value from spending the money that helping more than 2,000 birds would cost on something else. They may well get more satisfaction from contributing to the saving of 20,000 than 2,000 birds, but not enough more to justify spending more money on it. In other words, it might be that the cost of saving 18,000 more birds (20,000 minus 2,000) is not enough to justify the difference they would get in satisfaction. To rule out this second possibility, it would be necessary to show that people show scope insensitivity to moral opportunities, even when doing greater good does not cost them more. A study of risk-​taking by psychologist Julian Zlatev and his colleagues (2020) sought to do just this. This study presented participants with the choice between a guaranteed financial outcome and a risky financial option, with the money in one condition going to themselves and to a charity in another. The sure option was always the same amount of money (.25 cents), as was the probability of getting nothing associated with the risky option (25%). The potential gain for taking the risky option was manipulated with there being either a high potential gain (High Upside condition) or a low potential gain (Low Upside condition). Importantly, the potential gain in the Low Upside risky condition was still higher than the guaranteed gain in the sure option condition. Assuming that people are trying to maximize their outcomes, participants’ preference for the risky option should increase as the potential gain (expected value) increases. That is precisely what they did when the result benefited them personally. As the potential gain from the risky option rose, the percentage of participants willing to take the gamble (and forego a sure .25 cents) almost doubled. But this was not the pattern when the outcomes were destined for charity. Here participants were no more likely to take the risky choice in the High Upside than in the Low Upside condition. It appears that in the world in which the charity received a high likely outcome seemed no more attractive to participants than one in which they received a low likely outcome. If the size of the contribution to the charity affected the satisfaction they derived from their action, the expected outcome should affect their choice similarly to when they were the beneficiary of the decision. The scope insensitivity observed in the case of charity-​directed contributions cannot be explained by people thinking gifts beyond a specific amount were not worth

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the additional money or effort required, as choosing the option with the highest expected outcome was not any costlier. There also is more direct evidence for the claim that people’s insensitivity to the magnitude of a pro-​social act reflects the fact that the warm glow or identity satisfaction people derive from doing good does not depend on the amount of good they do. This evidence comes from a study that asked participants both how much they would be willing to pay for making contributions of various sizes to public goods and how much moral satisfaction they thought they would experience from acts of distinct benefit.6 The results indicated that anticipated moral satisfaction did not increase with the magnitude of their contribution, suggesting that whatever moral satisfaction people could get from doing good, they could obtain it as fully from doing a little as doing a lot.

How Much Evidence of Moral Credentials Is Enough? The scope insensitivity effects just reviewed suggest that people have low standards for seeing themselves as moral. They feel as good about themselves having availed themselves of a small moral opportunity as of a sizable moral opportunity. People seem to apply similarly low standards with respect to moral credentials. As revealed by inspection of the studies that find moral credential effects (described in Chapter 5), what counts as a moral credential can be very underwhelming. Put more bluntly, people’s security in their moral identity can be enhanced by surprisingly weak evidence. Consider an experiment that showed that men who previously had established credentials as nonsexists were more likely to recommend hiring a man over a woman for a construction job that was seen as potentially hostile to women.7 And the prior act that provided the license for them to make this seemingly sexist recommendation? It was disagreeing (which virtually everyone did) with the following statements: Most women are better off at home taking care of the children. Men are more emotionally suited for politics than are most women. The best job for most women is something like cook, nurse, or teacher. Most women need a man to protect them. Most women are not really smart. Think about it. How confident would you be that a male who disagreed with these statements was nonsexist? There would seem to be little diagnostic value in these disagreements as pertains to a person’s commitment to egalitarianism. True, the guy might not be an extreme sexist, but surely even a man who held keenly sexist views would disagree with these blatant sexist statements. At best, such behavior would seem weak evidence of a man’s lack of sexism. Given this, how willing would you be to give him the benefit of the doubt as to possible sexist

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motivation were he to recommend hiring a man for a job over an equally qualified woman? I suspect not much. The same point could be made about the way the previously described study instantiated the moral credentials of White participants confronting potential racism. Credentials were established by providing participants with the opportunity to recommend a Black (versus a White) candidate for a starting position in a large consulting firm. Each of five candidates was briefly described by means of a picture, name, college, grade point average (GPA), and major. In all conditions, the fourth applicant (either Black or White) was designed to be clearly the most qualified: He had graduated from a prestigious institution, had majored in economics, and had the highest GPA. In their choice of person for the job, virtually everyone went with this candidate. Does this credential provide strong evidence that the White participants harbored no racist beliefs? Not really, as it would seem that this would be the choice that anyone who was not a raving racist would make. To most of us, it is unlikely that the former action would be sufficient to allay our concern that someone was revealing their racism when they recommended hiring a White candidate over a Black candidate for the position of a police recruit when both were qualified. It did appear to do so for the participants themselves, however. Without this evidence to point to,White people acted as though they worried that this recommendation might be coming from a place of racism, or appear so to others, but with it they seem reassured it was not. Interesting! One study found that people can even credential themselves in their eyes by merely refraining from taking an immoral act that they could have made.8 The credentialing action here (for choosing a White over a Black candidate for a job as a police recruit) was identifying as the likely perpetrator of a crime, a clearly guilty White suspect rather than a clearly innocent Black one. Participants’ actions may have revealed them not to be the most extreme racist. However, most people want not just to be, or be seen to be, extreme racists.They wish not to be seen as racist to any degree, a standard that hardly seems established by the failure to finger as guilty a clearly innocent Black suspect. Nevertheless, participants acted as though their refusal to take a blatant racist action (accusing the Black suspect) provided them with bona fides as a nonracist. To secure a nonracist identity and to license themselves to express views that could seem prejudiced, it may not be necessary for White people to rely on the clichéd claim that “some of my best friends are Black”; instead, it may be sufficient for them to make the much weaker claim that “none of my worst enemies are Black.” The evidentiary standard for concluding that you are egalitarian appears to be quite a bit more lax when threat exists than when it does not. Indeed, a follow-​up study to the one just described found that when faced with identity-​ threatening actions, people lower their standards for evidence of threat-​diffusing virtue.9 Specifically, the researchers found that people confronting an identity test anticipated that observers would find weak evidence to be a stronger proof

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of virtue than those not facing such a trial. The behaviors in which threatened participants saw reassuring evidence represented molehills of virtue at best (i.e., declining to accuse a clearly innocent Black criminal suspect; choosing a fun task that raised .50 cents for charity instead of a tedious task that raised nothing). Nonetheless, threat led participants to treat these molehills more like mountains of morality. The finding that identity-​threatened people will find past behavior of theirs to be diagnostic of their virtue that non-​threatened people would not has an interesting implication. It suggests that actions that in retrospect rescue people from identity threat, do not in prospect inoculate people against identity threats via identity affirmation. That is, when people take actions that in retrospect may count as moral credentials, they do not, at the time of those actions, feel affirmed as a moral person. As such, the experiences that uphold people’s sense of themselves as moral people, and hence protect them against upcoming threats, will not necessarily be the same ones that will be evoked as moral credentials when people face an identity threat. Moral credits, in contrast to moral credentials, typically will have a more prospective-​facing effect. When someone says following a pro-​social act, “Well, I’ve done my good deed for the day,” they are acknowledging that they have some identity credit in the bank that they can spend down subsequently or at least later that day. A claim such as this typically would refer to something of more import than appears sufficient to reassuringly point to when you are trying to justify taking a morally problematic action.

How Much Penance Is Enough? As we saw in Chapter 3, people are quick to seize a moral opportunity when they suffer from guilt or diminished self-​regard. Opportunities to help another that come with too high a price for someone in possession of a secure moral identity may nonetheless be attractive to someone trying to bolster or reaffirm their moral identity. If moral opportunities have heightened utility to a person in search of redemption, how does the scope of the goodness involved in the opportunity translate into the completeness or degree of the identity restoration? In short, how much penance is enough? Research shows that people who fail an identity test will perform acts of benefit that their nonguilty selves will not, but what can we say about how the magnitude of those acts affects the dissipation of the guilt? Does any undertaking of pro-​social behavior serve to dissipate the motivating guilt, or does the amount of dissipation depend upon its degree? The honest answer to these questions is, we do not know, as there has been very little research done on this question. Research by psychologists Donald Dutton and Vicki Lennox (1974) does offer some insight into this question by showing that once a person’s diminished sense of moral worth has been restored to an acceptable level, the person’s motivation to further increase their moral standing drops. These researchers found that

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threatening White people with evidence that they might not be as egalitarian as they wished (by giving them false physiological feedback suggesting that they were getting upset at the sight of interracial couples) led the participants to subsequently give more change to a Black panhandler than to a White one. Going beyond previous research, however, this research showed that availing themselves of the opportunity to give to a Black panhandler subsequently reduced White participants’ willingness to comply with a request to participate in a “Brotherhood” campaign, as if the token donation to the panhandler was sufficient to counteract the concern raised by the previous feedback. A parsimonious explanation for this pattern of results is that threatening the White participants’ moral identity made them vigilant for opportunities to affirm their identity, such as the one provided by the Black (but not the White) panhandler. Once they seized this opportunity, however, their need for subsequent affirmation was diminished. Stated in the language of economics, the initial moral threat increased the marginal utility of an opportunity to help a Black person compared to a White person, but once this opportunity was consumed and the participant’s moral equilibrium restored, the marginal utility of subsequent moral opportunities dropped. The fact that a token act (giving money to a panhandler) was sufficient to make it unnecessary for people to take the opportunity to participate in a more meaningful act of egalitarianism is telling. Although we cannot say so with complete confidence, it would appear that when people are trying to restore their identity equilibrium following a failed identity test, even a small amount of social good suffices. They may be willing to do something big to escape their diminished sense of self if nothing smaller is available, but even something small appears capable of making them whole again.10 Once they have established a “good enough” standard of moral self-​regard, their overarching goal of maximizing general subjective well-​being likely will lead people to try to satisfy other (nonmoral identity) goals that are important to them.

Summary People are surprisingly easily satisfied as to the validity of their identity claims. People seeking moral satisfaction through pro-​social acts need not engage in acts of much magnitude to feel sated on this score. One manifestation of this is that people’s attraction to pro-​social actions is very insensitive to the social benefit produced by those acts. Doing a great deal of good does not seem much more gratifying to people than doing a little good. Likewise, a similar pattern emerges with respect to reparative actions taken after compromising a valued identity. People are quick to seize opportunities to affirm their threatened identities, but they are also ready to feel affirmed, however small or large their reparative actions are. Finally, the magnitude of the moral measures necessary to license people to

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engage in morally questionable activities is also slight. People are capable of seeing a mountain of virtue in a molehill of virtuous acts.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Kahneman & Knetch (1992). Mitchell & Carson (1989). Boyle, Bishop, & Welsh (1993). Imas (2013). Jung, Nelson, Gneezy, U., & Gneezy (2017). Kahneman & Knetsch (1992). Monin & Miller (2001). Effron, Monin, & Miller (2012). Effron (2014). Brock & Becker (1966).

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7 SOCIAL IDENTITY TESTS

The self-​concept comprises not one, but two identities.1 The first, the focus of my discussion thus far, is personal identity—​for example, your identity as a moral person. An individual’s personal identity reflects self-​knowledge based on their unique attributes (i.e., those attributes that differentiate them from other individuals). A second component of the self is social identity, self-​knowledge based on the (social) categories that they see as important. Social group memberships can be large-​scale, ascribed social categories (e.g., ethnicity), professional groups (e.g., scientists), or interest-​based groups (e.g., environmental groups). When people come to categorize themselves as similar to others, they embrace as their own those characteristics that they share with those others and that differentiate their fellow group members from members of other groups. The values of groups with which they identify (called prototypical values), thus, become self-​relevant and self-​defining.2 This account suggests that many of the identity tests we face are social identity tests. We want to be worthy members of the social identities that define us: not just a good person but a good farmer, a good conservative, a good Australian, and so on. The power and function of social identities are dramatically and often comically illustrated by Don Quixote,3 one of the most famous characters in world literature. Cervantes’ famous character, having read over 100 books on chivalric tales, embraces the social identity of a knight-​errant. He filters everything he does, says, and feels through the lens of that identity. Not everyone may be as consumed by a social identity (e.g., the fraternity of knights-​errant) as is Don Quixote, but for all of us, being a good person means being a good member of the groups with which we identify. We accept as identity relevant that which is true of our group’s members—​people like us. We feel virtuous expressing the defining attitudes of our group and feel uncomfortable expressing, or even holding, views that differ

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from those of our group. This psychology means, among other things, that we will embrace positions or beliefs that a good member of these categories should embrace, even when those positions are inconsistent with our personal identities. To show the function of social identities and their centrality in the self-​concept, I will describe two strands of research. The first shows how the values and beliefs that comprise people’s social identities predict their behavior often better than do their personal ideals, views, or material interests. The second demonstrates that reminding people of their social identities leads them to act more in accordance with the values, norms, and practices of those identities.

The Power of Social Identities To embrace a social identity means that your allegiance to that identity, and the values associated with it, are going to be continually tested, for people’s personal preferences and those of their social identity are often inconsistent. For example, a college student might personally not want to drink as much as that dictated by their social identity as a student, sorority member, or football player. If excessive drinking is more central to a social identity the student values than more moderate drinking is to their personal identity, they will feel pressure to drink more than they personally want to in order to avoid failing an identity test. Importantly, this pressure need not come from those sharing the valued social identity (e.g., other sorority members). Sufficient (internal) pressure will come from the person’s claim that they embrace the ideals of their valued social identity. Don Quixote did not comply with the prototypical ideals of knights-​errant because of peer pressure. The capacity of social identity concerns to trump personal preferences and even material interests is evident in a host of decisions people make, including those involving travel plans,4 food purchases,5 and energy savings.6 The more central a social identity is to a person’s sense of self (e.g., farmer, Australian), the more strongly the person will align themselves with the prototypical values of the identity and the more likely violations of those values will be experienced as failed identity tests.

Fuzzy Social Identities In the case of professional social categories (e.g., college student) and many other categories (e.g., nationality), the basis for self-​definition is objectively clear. Most people who identify as a farmer or an Australian will fit a socially agreed-​upon definition. Many social identities are more subjectively than objectively defined. Consider someone who identifies as being “green.” Can we assume that those people who claim the identity as someone who follows a green lifestyle could be identified by the number of environmentally friendly practices they follow, such as conserving water or energy, recycling, carpooling, and so on? Not necessarily. The

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relation between the extent of people’s environmentally friendly practices and their tendency to label themselves as pursuing a green lifestyle is not a strong one. People who engage in few environmentally friendly practices sometimes label themselves as green and people who engage in many environmentally friendly practices sometimes do not label themselves as green. The fact that people’s identity and behaviors do not closely correspond allows researchers to see whether an identity claim and the behaviors relevant to that identity have independent effects on people’s psychology. A large study of over 100,000 people in the UK found evidence of just such independence.7 The researchers hypothesized that engaging in a “green lifestyle” would correlate positively with people’s satisfaction with their life (what psychologists call well-​being). Interestingly, the results indicated that the strongest relationship was not between green behaviors and well-​being but between holding a green identity and well-​ being. It appeared that the key to feeling more satisfied with your life was not so much engaging in green practices but in identifying as someone who lived a green lifestyle. Consider next the ideological labels liberal and conservative. How do people come to attach one of these labels to themselves? One possibility is that they reflect upon their ideological positions—​concluding that if their opinions are conservative, they are conservative, and if their opinions are liberal, they are liberal. Ideological identities, like green identities, do not inevitably follow this bottom-​ up process, however. Following are examples of statements that researchers typically ask people to assess their ideology: “One of the big problems in this country is that we don’t give everyone an equal chance.” “Has the government gotten big because it’s meddlesome or because the problems are big?” “This country would have many fewer problems if there were more emphasis on traditional family ties.” As we saw in the case of the green self-​identity, predicting people’s self-​identity on the liberal/​conservative dimension from answers to questions like these is not straightforward. Routinely, people who embrace identities as liberal versus conservative, are found to hold beliefs that contradict their self-​defined identity. For example, one estimate is that approximately 30% of Americans who describe themselves as conservatives hold views that can be characterized as liberal.8 As a consequence, many people who endorse liberal beliefs, such as the belief that “one of the big problems in this country is that we don’t give everyone an equal chance,” nevertheless, identify themselves as conservative. What this shows is that identity is often more an expressive claim about who you are than an evidence-​ based inference about who you are.9 The independence of beliefs and identity is especially surprising because even if people’s initial claims to an identity are not

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based on their personal beliefs, the pressure of being true to that identity (e.g., conservative) might be expected to bring their attitudes into line with that social identity. Not only are people’s ideological identities not simply summaries of their ideological beliefs, but their ideological identities predict their behaviors better than their ideological beliefs. For example, research finds that people are more likely to date people who share their ideological identity (e.g., liberal vs. conservative) than agree with them on ideological issues.10 It appears that when it comes to the attractiveness of others, it matters less that they are like-​minded than like-​identified. Now, consider this question asked of American survey respondents shortly after America’s involvement in the 1992 Iraq war: “Taking everything into account, do you think that the war in Iraq has been worth the cost or not?” Americans’ answers to this question were more consistent with their ideological identity (self-​identified liberals answered no; self-​identified conservatives responded yes) than their ideological beliefs. The same was true of people who indicated their support for a fictitious farm subsidy proposal that researchers said had liberal or conservative support. Regardless of their ideological views on government intervention, people who identified as liberals supported subsidies when they were told liberals supported it; and opposed it when they were told conservatives supported it and vice versa for self-​identified conservatives.11 To the extent people are uncomfortable holding beliefs or taking actions that deviate from their ideological identity (failing an identity test), we should not be surprised that identities often are more predictive of their beliefs and actions than their ideological beliefs. Moreover, we should expect that the greater the strength of someone’s identity, the greater the coherence we will find in the constellation of attitudes and behaviors of that person. For example, consider the political affiliation of those who identity with the demographic category Hispanic/​Latino in the U.S. This identity tends to be associated with support for the Democratic Party, but the relationship grows much stronger the more the individual identifies as Hispanic/​Latino. The more important it is to someone to be a good Hispanic/​ Latino, the more critical it will be for them to embrace the prototypical attitudes and actions of that identity, which means supporting the Democratic Party.12

Gender Identity When economists speak of people trying to maximize utility in their decisions, including job decisions, they usually are referring to material (financial) well-​ being. As we saw in earlier chapters, however, people also derive utility from acting in ways that affirm their image of themselves—​for example, as a moral actor. Economists George Akerlof and Rachel Kranton (2000) contend that people also derive utility from, and hence, are influenced in their decision-​making by acting in ways that affirm their gender identity. By their account, identity influences

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employment decisions because people incur disutility when they take a job that is incongruent with the norms of their social category (e.g., gender). To avoid this disutility, which manifests itself as guilt and uncertainty, people conform to their sense of social identity in their job selection and economic decisions more generally. Consider first the low female employee representation (less than 25%) in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM)-​related occupations.13 One explanation for this gender gap looks to the discrimination of (stereotyping) employers. Employers are more likely to hire males than females, and to a lesser extent, vice versa for different jobs. Researchers have amply documented that stereotypes about the abilities of men and women affect hiring decisions that disadvantage women. More generally, stereotypes about women are a formidable obstacle to their economic and political progress. A second explanation for job segregation focuses not on what economists define as the demand side of the equation, but rather on the supply side. It is not only about who is hired for a job but about who applies for it.Why might women be less likely than men to apply for jobs that pay well and carry prestige? One possibility is that they think, not unreasonably, that because of stereotypes, their chances of being hired or fairly treated are low. A second possibility is that they share the stereotypes and believe that their abilities are not well suited to particular jobs.14 But the story does not end there. Remember that gender stereotypes are beliefs, not just about what men and women are like (descriptive beliefs), but about what they should be like (prescriptive beliefs). Even were a woman to believe she had the requisite ability to be successful in a STEM field, she may not opt into that field if she holds the belief that doing so violates the image she and society share about what a good woman is and does. Participating in a STEM field will make her seem out of step with her gender’s prototypical values. It will leave her feeling that she has failed a gender identity test. According to this account, women avoid STEM fields not only to avoid being treated as though they are not good at math but to avoid being treated as though there is something wrong with them for being good at or even liking math. Considerable evidence suggests that one reason women avoid STEM domains is that they fear doing so would violate an identity test. One relevant type of evidence comes from looking at the perceptions of STEM fields. Both men and women associate STEM fields with maleness.15 Moreover, the more women associate STEM fields with maleness, the less likely they are to identify with those fields themselves.16 To get a sense of how those in STEM fields are perceived, consider the adjectives that male and female college students provided when asked to describe a prototypical member of the STEM community:  the computer scientist.17 Among the most common descriptors were socially awkward, physically unattractive, and romantically unsuccessful. Oh, yes, and smart too. In essence, people see computer scientists as technology-​obsessed nerds. Not only

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are computer scientists assumed to be male then, but a particularly unappealing version of the male gender. It should not surprise us that women would find this a particularly unattractive and identity-​incongruent stereotype. Other evidence of the impact of gender identity on economic decisions comes from studies showing that the more women identify with “masculine” traits, such as “independent,”“assertive,” and “not emotional,” the more likely they are to enter male-​dominated fields of study.18 Furthermore, research reveals that the closer the correspondence between women’s image of themselves and the image of their job, the higher their job satisfaction and the lower their turnover intentions.19 These data, while certainly not conclusive, are consistent with the view that the more women embrace their identity as female, and hence those traits central to that identity, the more uncomfortable they will be participating in fields that have male identities. There has been less attention given to the influence of male identities on economic choices because gender differences provide an economic advantage rather than a disadvantage to males. Male identity-​driven economic decisions do disadvantage society, however, because males’ avoidance of identity-​threatening professions can cause problematic shortages in those professions. Nursing is one field where shortages frequently exist, in large part because both men and women see the nursing profession as “female.” Just as women fear to fail an identity test by becoming a computer scientist, men fear to fail an identity test by becoming a nurse, one consequence of which is only 11.9% of nurses are male.20 There is a lot of evidence that the choice of a nursing career produces gender identity incongruence (spoiled masculinity) in males.21 This evidence includes the reluctance of men to join the nursing profession and the identity-​protective actions they take when they do enter it. One way that men make the career choice of nursing more congruent with their gender identity is through the accounts they offer for entering the profession. Men’s accounts are more likely to emphasize practical considerations, such as job security, and less likely to emphasize altruism, caring, and self-​empowerment, than those of women.22 Additionally, male nurses try to minimize identity threats by choosing nursing specialties that gravitate away from caring and altruism, toward technical areas such as emergency rooms, ICU, operating rooms, anesthesia, or mental health.23 These specialties allow men to describe their work as “adrenaline charged” that demands quick thinking under pressure. Similar identity-​affirming tactics can be found among males entering other professions that have historically been seen as having a female identity. For example, male secretaries prefer the title executive assistant, and male librarians prefer the titles “information scientist” or “researcher,” thereby highlighting the technical skills required. Recasting job content to emphasize its masculine components also occurs in other “female” professions. Male members of airline cabin crews, for example, highlight the “male” safety and security demands of the job over and above the more “female” service functions.24

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Male identities are threatened by more than the jobs they hold. They can be threatened even by the diet they follow. Consider veganism, the practice of not eating meat, dairy, eggs, or any product derived from an animal ingredient. The popularity of this practice is growing in the Western world, but remains highly gendered, with only 20% of vegans being male. One likely reason for this is the perception that vegans, especially those who espouse veganism out of compassion for animals, are less masculine than nonvegans.25 It is instructive to see how male vegans respond to a life choice that violates a gender identity norm. An especially common tact is to reframe veganism as, in fact, masculine. John Joseph (2014), a musician and vegan, reframes it vividly with the title of his book: Meat Is for Pussies: A How-​To Guide for Dudes Who Want to Get Fit, Kick Ass, and Take Names.26 Interviews with male vegans show additional, more subtle ways that veganism can be construed to be compatible with the male identity. For example, compared to female vegans, male vegans describe their choice as less an act of compassion for animals and more an act of courage or rebellion. They see what they are doing as “being a hero for a cause” and “being true to themselves” and, as such, as being quintessentially masculine.You have to be tough to live without meat and resist the pressure to conform to the meat-​eating culture, a claim that male vegans often make.27 Outsiders may think their food choice reflects a failed gender identity test; however, male vegans vigorously deny the accusation, often pointing to professional vegan male athletes as another argument against the charge.

Responding to a Failed Masculinity Identity Test In Chapter  4, we reviewed the evidence on how people responded to actions of theirs that threatened their image of themselves as moral actors. We saw that a typical response to such behavior was to seize upon moral opportunities as a means of restoring their self-​images. Specifically, following a failed moral identity test, people are motivated to take actions they would not otherwise choose to rehabilitate their tarnished self-​image.28 Several studies find that men who fail male identity tests do something similar. The failed male identity test in these studies is typically an actual test purported to assess masculinity. One example is “gender knowledge tests” that ask about facts concerning auto mechanics, sports, fashion, and childcare. Other examples are “masculinity tests” or “gender identity tests” that ask people to indicate how descriptive particular characteristic traits are of them. Once they have taken one of these tests, researchers inform participants, independently of how they answered the tests, that their scores indicated that they scored more like the average woman than the average man or vice versa.Then, the researchers present the participants with opportunities to shore up their masculine identities. The research consistently shows that men whose identities have been threatened, compared to those whose had not, tend to act in ways more congruent with a male identity.This behavior may involve creating a more muscular avatar in

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a subsequent computer game, avoiding feminine merchandise in their consumer choices, or expressing less support for gay people and more support for war.29 Opportunities to affirm their masculinity through words and actions are always available to men, but their appeal to males is especially great when their gender identities have been challenged. However, there is an important difference between the compensatory actions people have been to take when their moral identity versus gender identity has been tested. The costs people are required to incur to affirm themselves in experiments focusing on threat to moral identity tend to be material in nature—​they have to expend effort or money to restore their image. The cost that those in gender identity threat studies are required to incur is rarely material, though they could be. Instead, they typically are psychological and often involve threatening another personally valued identity. Men may care about being egalitarian and nonsexist. Still, they appear willing to put those identities at risk (e.g., by expressing disapproval of gay rights) if, by doing so, they can affirm their identity as a good version of the male gender category.

The Power of a Primed Social Identity A major contribution of contemporary social psychology is the recognition that group influence does not require the physical presence of group members.30 Groups also exert power over us through the social identities we embrace and, as such, through the cognitive representations we hold of what people like us do, say, and believe. As with any cognitive representation, a social identity will be more or less salient (top of the head) at different times. When some cue in your context makes salient an aspect of your identity, the stored knowledge (e.g., attitudes) associated with that identity also will be activated.This means that the more salient an aspect of your identity, the more consistent your attitudes and behaviors should be with that identity. One demonstration of this comes from a study that looked at the support among Australian college students for the belief that humans contribute to climate change.31 Reminding participants of their identity as a supporter of either right-​wing or left-​wing parties (i.e., priming their political identity) decreased right-​wing supporters’ belief in the human contribution to climate change. Indeed, the researchers only found differences between left-​wing and right-​wing college supporters in their attribution of climate change to human activity when they primed their political group membership. Consider a second study on identity priming and attitudes toward climate change.32 This study wanted to see if Americans who identified as Republicans, and who tended hold more conservative attitudes toward climate change, would express more progressive attitudes if their identity as parents was made salient. The researcher did this by asking participants questions such as “How many children do you have?” and “What are their ages?” As expected, compared to those Republicans who had not been asked these questions, those who had were more likely to agree that “Climate change is a pressing issue” after

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reading UNICEF’s report on the effects of climate change on children. Their Republican self may not have been concerned reading about climate change but their parent self was. A similar demonstration of the power of social identity salience comes from research that compared the attitudes of British science and nonscience college majors toward animal vivisection (operating on live animals for purposes of experimentation) following either priming or not priming their academic identities (i.e., either asking them or not asking them their academic major).33 In the priming condition, the researchers showed students from science and social science faculties a film presenting arguments for and against vivisection, after which the researchers told them that the science students had a pro-​vivisection norm and social science students an anti-​vivisection norm. In the non-​priming condition, the two groups of students watched the same film, but the researchers made no mention of their major or the attitudes of those sharing their major. The researchers predicted that group priming conditions would increase the salience of the students’ social identity and the appropriate attitudes for that identity. Consistent with this reasoning, the study found that science majors whose identities had been primed were more supportive of vivisection; whereas, the opposite was true for nonscience majors whose identities had been primed. The power of a primed social identity can even be found in people’s expressed enjoyment of food that is associated with their social identity.34 Canadians, primed with their national identity, who tasted both honey and maple syrup as part of an experiment expressed a greater liking for the latter (a food associated with a Canadian identity) than those not so primed. Also, participants from the southern U.S. whose identity as Southerners was primed reported that a sample of grits (a food associated with the southern U.S.) tasted better than those not so primed. It seems you cannot be a good Canadian and not like maple syrup or a good Southerner and not like grits. The material consequences of identity priming were shown in a study that addressed women’s well-​established tendencies to take less risk (to be more risk averse) than males when making economic decisions.35 In particular, it looked at whether priming a non-​gender identity in women (their professional identity as a scientist) might shift their propensity for risk-​taking closer to that of men. If women are innately disposed to be, or even socialized to be, more risk averse than men, priming a non-​gender identity should not influence them. The study was an online field experiment with almost 500 scientists of various ages.36 The researchers experimentally varied the salience of either the private or the professional identity of the participant. They did this by asking participants nine questions related to professional or private contexts. For example, participants in the professional identity condition were asked, “Where did you last go for a conference/​workshop?” Participants in the private identity control condition were asked, “Where did you last go on holiday?” To assess participants’ propensity for risk, researchers used an incentivized risk task that asked participants to choose

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one out of six lotteries that increased in riskiness, ranging from a safe option to a highly risky one. In keeping with previous studies, the researchers found that females generally opted for lower-​risk lotteries than males. However, those females primed with their professional identity displayed a higher level of risk-​seeking behavior than those not primed. Furthermore, the gender gap in risk-​taking decreased with age and entirely disappeared among senior scientists when their professional identity was salient. This result suggests that women’s customary risk aversion is not innate, but rather learned as something that is gender-​identity appropriate. When they were thinking of themselves as something other than a woman (namely, a scientist), their gender identity exercised less control over them. In the profession primed condition, they were thinking about being a good scientist, not a good woman.

Summary People value being good representatives of the social groups to which they feel attached. Their conceptions of what good members of their social categories think, do, and feel powerfully affect what they do and say—​often more so than their personal beliefs, especially if the relevant social category is primed. Failing a social identity test can be as uncomfortable as failing a personal identity test. For example, people’s discomfort with acting in ways inconsistent with their gender identity leads them to seek ways to rationalize problematic actions as compatible with their gender identity. Moreover, it causes them to take reparative steps following their actions that threaten their self-​or public gender image.The actions people are willing to take to reaffirm a threatened gender identity often invalidate other identities they value.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

Tajfel (1974). Ellemers, Kortekaas, & Ouwerkerk (1999). Cervantes Saavedra (2003). Barth, Jugert, & Fritsche (2016). Masson & Fritsche (2014); Dean, Raats, & Shepherd (2012). Schultz et al. (2015). Binder & Blankenberg (2017). Ellis & Stimson (2009). Malka & Lelkes (2010). Klofstad, McDermott, & Hatemi (2012). Malka & Lelkes (2010). Huddy, Mason, & Nechama-​Horwitz (2016). Noonan (2017). Correll (2004). For example, women are less likely than men to enroll in math degrees and classes based in part on their beliefs that they have a lower ability.

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15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

Carli, Alawa, Lee, Zhao, & Kim (2016). Akerlof & Kranton (2000). Cheryan, Cameron, Katogiri, & Monin (2015). Antecol & Cobb-​Clark (2013). Starr (2018). Munnich & Wozniak (2017). Evans & Blye (2003). Boughn (2001). Muldoon & O’Reilly (2003); Cottingham (2015). Williams (1988). Thomas (2016). The Netflix documentary Game Changers represents another attempt to make veganism more compatible with masculinity. Greenebaum & Dexter (2016). Cheryan et al. (2015). Cheryan et al. (2015); Willer et al. (2013). Turner et. al. (1987). Unsworth & Fielding (2014). Pechar (2019). Reicher (1984). Cruwys, Platow, Rieger, Byrne, & Haslam (2016). Charness & Gneezy, U. (2012). Drupp, Khadjavi, Riekhof, & Voss (2017).

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8 INCENTIVES AND IDENTITY CLAIMS

The fact that the identity relevance of an action influences people’s willingness to take such action has an important policy implication. Namely, policies that modify the status of a behavior as an identity test or opportunity will be an effective way to change its prevalence. The next two chapters examine the role that such modifications play in public policy implementation. The topic of this chapter is how material incentives influence the identity relevance of behavior. When we want people to do something that we think is in our interest, their interest, or in the public interest, it is common to use monetary carrots and sticks. We provide them with a financial benefit (subsidy) if they take the desired action and impose a financial cost (fine/​tax) on them if they do not take the desired action. In the language of economists, employing incentives changes the net price of engaging in a particular behavior, either reducing or increasing it. To illustrate, consider how a policy analyst concerned about the preservation of a particular endangered bird species (say, the red-​tailed hawk) might confront the challenge of motivating farmers to dedicate some of their lands to provide habitat for these birds. The situation the farmers find themselves in is known as a public goods dilemma. All of the farmers will benefit if some of their neighbors commit land to the public good (the birds eat pests and are majestic). However, individual farmers benefit most from “free-​r iding” and letting their neighbors bear the cost of lost revenue. One possible means of reducing the temptation to free-​r ide among the farmers is to appeal to their images of themselves as good citizens and conservators of the environment. But not all farmers will value this identity, and even those who do might not be willing to incur the financial cost of lost crops necessary to affirm it. Therefore, a second possibility is to use public funds to compensate farmers

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financially for their lost crop revenue. We all benefit from public goods, and so it seems only fair that we pay those who bear the costs of providing them. If identity motivation is not present in the farmers, or even if it is but not in sufficient amounts to produce the necessary dedicated land, the motivation created by financial compensation should help address the identity motivational shortfall. In effect, this would be providing farmers with two types of subsidies for taking the desired behavior—​a financial one and a self or public esteem one. Farmers who did the “right thing” would be both economically and psychologically compensated. But can an action that achieves the goal of financially enriching yourself also accomplish the goal of affirming or protecting your identity? As it turns out, not always. Indeed, the offer of economic subsidies for the provision of public goods can sometimes backfire.

When Do Economic Subsidies Backfire? Why might the appeal of an identity-​affirming activity diminish when it is economically subsidized? In considering this, let us return once again to the distinction between identity opportunities and identity tests. Identity opportunities carry psychological subsidies with them—​when people avail themselves of them, they feel good because doing so affirms their identity. In contrast, moral tests bring psychological taxes with them—​when people fail moral tests, they feel bad because they have compromised their moral identity. With this distinction in mind, we can see there are two routes by which economic subsidies might backfire. First, they could render an action less of a moral opportunity; second, they could make an action more of a moral test. I examine each of these two possibilities in turn.

Nullifying Moral Opportunities If people view a situation as presenting an opportunity to affirm their moral private and public image, why might offering them compensation for seizing that opportunity diminish rather than increase the likelihood of that happening? Consider this. How would you see each of the following two farmers: one who ceded five acres of his land for an endangered bird species habitat without any promise of compensation, and a second who ceded the same amount of land but received a sizeable settlement for doing so? I suspect that, like me, you would be more confident of the public-​spiritedness of the first farmer than the second.The second farmer might have been willing to commit land without compensation, but we cannot know this for sure.Thus, while there might well be public-​spirited types among the economically minded kinds who exchange their property for payment, we cannot identify who they are. No such problem exists among those who donate their land without the expectation of compensation. Accordingly, this analysis suggests that if the farmer’s motivation

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is to impress others—​ foster a reputation as a public-​ spirited neighbor—​ they would not be well served by accepting the offer of compensation. The farmer would have to do something else to make that case. What if a farmer’s goal is to foster not their public reputation as a public-​ spirited neighbor but their private image of themselves as public-​spirited? The same logic would apply. You can never be sure what your motivation is—​you might like to think that you did it for the right reasons, but you could never be sure. Moreover, were you to view the acceptance of the offer as a commercial transaction, its moral identity potential would be further diminished.1 Thus, farmers who want to see themselves as public-​spirited should be less attracted to requests to dedicate a portion of their land for conservation when they are offered compensation.

Blood Donation The claim that economic remuneration can diminish contributions to public goods was first made in the case of blood donation by social scientist Richard Titmuss (1971). Blood supply is a classic example of a collective action problem, and the attendant dilemma it poses. We all benefit from an adequate amount of blood in our community. However, it is in our interest to “free-​ride” on the public-​spirited behavior of others, thereby avoiding the hassle and costs of giving blood while benefiting from the blood pool nevertheless. Many researchers have examined whether compensating people for donating blood increases or decreases donation rates, but no definitive answer has emerged.2 Nonetheless, there is reason to believe that payment for donation can have a substantially detrimental effect on identity motivation. There are two reasons compensation could consistently render giving blood a less appealing opportunity to those looking to affirm their moral identity but increase blood donation rates overall. First, it is likely that not everyone in a community will see blood donation as a moral opportunity or wish to affirm their identity as a moral person. For these people, compensation might well make more attractive the opportunity to give blood. If the number of these people in a community outnumbers those for whom compensation deprived them of a moral opportunity, we might still expect a net increase in blood donations following the introduction of payment. Second, if the payment were large enough, even those who would derive identity affirmation from donating for free might similarly agree to do it, recognizing that they were not affirming their identity by doing so. A field experiment with three conditions established that an offer of a financial incentive could diminish the willingness of at least some people to donate blood.3 In one (the baseline) condition, the researchers asked participants whether they wanted to donate blood with no mention of an incentive. If they chose to give, a bus took them directly to the nearest donation center. In a second condition, the researchers told the would-​be volunteers that they would receive money

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if they chose to donate blood. In a third condition, the researchers also told the would-​be volunteers that they would receive cash for contributing, but additionally told them they would have the possibility of giving the money to a charitable organization. Overall, there were no significant differences across the three conditions. However, the researchers found a strong interaction with gender. The propensity of men to donate blood was unaffected by the manipulations, whereas the responsiveness of women was strongly affected by them. Compared to the baseline condition, females’ donation rates were markedly lower in the cash-​for-​ blood condition, but only when they did not have the opportunity (which most of them took) to donate their compensation to a charity. For females at least, money appears to diminish the appeal of the opportunity to donate blood.

Symbolic Rewards versus Monetary Rewards Health officials often use nonmonetary inducements to incentivize blood donation. Research consistently shows that nonfinancial incentives are generally more effective than straight cash.4 One relevant study surveyed over 45,000 U.S. blood donors on their attitudes toward incentives for blood donation.5 The respondents indicated that offering blood credit, cholesterol screening, and prostate-​specific antigen screening for donations would increase their willingness to donate but that providing financial incentives would have the opposite effect. Similarly, a survey of blood donors in Italy found that a substantial share of the respondents declared they would stop being donors if the health service compensated them for their donation with ten euros in cash. However, they would not stop if the health service gave them a voucher of the same nominal value.6 A field experiment utilizing the same pool of Italian donors found that publicly announcing symbolic prizes for donors also increased rather than decreased donation rates among the donors.7 Why might symbolic rewards, vouchers, and coupons be more effective than actual cash, the standard currency in commercial transactions, in inducing people to donate blood? Or, in the language of economics, why does the supply displacement of identity-​driven blood donation that occurs under economic compensation not occur under nonmonetary compensation? One possibility is that the opportunity to affirm your identity as a good citizen and moral person is not removed or compromised by the offer of nonmonetary rewards. Perhaps this is because this form of compensation does not “commercialize” the transaction or “commodify” the gift.This conclusion was reached by researchers who conducted a 15-​country representative survey of potential blood donors in which they asked participants about the appeal of both monetary and nonmonetary incentives.8 They found that the attraction for the different forms of compensation depended on the respondents’ experience with blood donation. Those who favored monetary rewards for blood donation tended not to have donated in the past, while those supporting nonmonetary (social) rewards were likely to have previously

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given blood. The latter presumably were mostly motivated to maintain blood donation as a moral opportunity. As these researchers put it, “altruistic action may be incentivized as long as the incentives do not interfere with the self-​identity of the individual as a donor.”

Beyond Blood Donation Although blood donation is the prosocial context in which researchers have most extensively studied incentives, they have also examined several other circumstances. One large survey looked at the relationship between compensation and community volunteering.9 It found that compensating volunteers reduced their volunteer rate by an average of four hours per month. One interesting field experiment on the effects of incentives on volunteering took advantage of an annual tradition in Israel, wherein high school students collect monetary donations from households to support cancer research, disabled children, and various other charitable causes.10 The researchers approached 180 students who were about to participate in the tradition with one of three pitches. In the control condition, they merely told the students of the importance of the charitable activity; in the other two situations, the researchers said to the participants that they would compensate them by giving them 1% or 10%, respectively, of the amount they solicited. For the latter two groups, it was made clear that the payment would come from the researchers and not the agencies benefiting from the donations. The donation amounts collected did not differ between the control (no compensation) and the 10% compensation condition; but, the money raised in these two conditions both exceeded that found in the 1% compensation condition. Consider first why the collection rate in the control condition was higher than in the 1% compensation condition. This difference is consistent with the claim that the control condition provided students with the opportunity to affirm a positive image of themselves but that the offer of small compensation (1% of solicitations) replaced the moral opportunity frame with an economic framework. Next, consider the higher collection rate in the 10% compensation condition than in the 1% compensation condition. The offer of 10% of the collections likely also served to convert a potential moral frame into an economic one, but here the substituted extrinsic motivation, unlike the 1% condition, compensated for the loss of a moral opportunity. A similar pattern of results was found in a survey of college students’ willingness to help lift a stranger’s sofa into a truck for different levels of remuneration.11 Students reported that they were less likely to agree to help for .50 cents than for nothing but that they were more likely to assist for $5 than .50 cents. The sofa-​lifting study also provided an example of the tendency of symbolic rewards to function differently than monetary rewards. In addition to finding that their college student participants were less willing to help when they were offered .50 cents than when the researchers offered them nothing, the researchers

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found that participants were as willing to help for .50 cents worth of candy as for nothing. That is, they did unless the researchers monetized the candy—​the researchers told the participants how much it cost. The evidence reviewed thus far suggests that the detrimental effect of compensation on the identity utility derived from charitable giving can be blunted if the payment does not fit the template of a traditional economic exchange. But one study challenges this view. This research examined the impact of giving people a thank-​you gift (a cloth shopping bag) in exchange for money donated to victims of national disasters.12 It found that the offer of such a gift decreased giving—​ though not if the researchers framed the contribution as having the potential to benefit others. Why might a nonmonetary gift have crowded out charitable giving in this context when it did not in other domains? One possibility is that the framing of the bag offer simply seemed too much like a commercial exchange to would-​be donors to provide them with a moral opportunity unless the researchers pointed out to them that the bag actually could be used to help others. One final example of how the opportunity to do good is less attractive when the cost goes down is provided by a study of the Danish milk market, where organic milk enjoys a 30% market share.13 We can expect the magnitude of the moral opportunity afforded by the purchase of a “good” variant of a product (organic milk) to increase with its price premium over the “bad” variant of the product (non-​organic dairy). Thus, if part of the appeal that organic milk has to consumers is what their willingness to pay extra for it says about their virtue, then that appeal should diminish as the price premium for it decreases.To test this reasoning, a group of researchers assessed how discounting the price of organic milk to the price level of conventional milk affected the purchasing behavior of those consumers classified as reputation-​ concerned versus reputation-​ unconcerned. Reputational concern was assessed by consumers’ answers to survey questions, such as, “It is important to me to set a good example by buying organic products.” Analysis of scanner data on the effects of price discount weeks supported the hypothesis by showing that the most reputation-​concerned consumers reduced demand (-​6%) for organic milk during price discount week, whereas the least concerned increased demand (+12%).

Identity Strength and Crowding Out If compensation destroys the identity-​affirming potential of contributing to the public good, and hence the willingness to do so, then we should expect to find this effect most strongly among people whose public and private identities are most invested in being public-​spirited. It is not easy to assess identity motivation in field studies, but there are a couple of findings that speak to this question. First, as we saw previously, the negative effect of compensation on blood donation tends to be restricted to those who already were blood donors. Those who previously did not donate blood (and presumably did not see it as a moral opportunity or did not

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care that it was) were more likely to give blood for compensation. Second, though a study found that volunteer firefighters offered small stipends generally increased their turn-​out rates, the opposite was true of those who had vanity plates that featured their volunteer firefighter identity.14 This finding makes sense if the latter are the ones who derived identity affirmation from their public service.

What Happens If a Moral Opportunity Disappears? Some worry that compensating people for contributing to public goods has a generally corrosive effect on civic behavior. As philosopher Michael Sandel (2012) says, “Putting a price on every human activity erodes certain moral and civic goals worth caring about” (p. 121). This circumstance may be the case when we compensate or tax all would-​be moral actions, but, until that happens, we might simply expect that people would look elsewhere for their fix of identity affirmation. That people trade off charitable acts and look for substitutes when one action ceases to be available is supported in a thought-​provoking study that looked at the relationship between charitable donation and religious attendance.15 You might think that these two acts would go together—​that churchgoers/​non-​churchgoers would donate more/​less—​but, it turns out that charitable giving and church attendance are inversely related. This fact suggests that these two activities may substitute for one another: Either attending church or donating to charity suffices to affirm one’s moral identity. If people can feel sufficiently virtuous by either going to church or donating to charity, they need not do both.

Converting Moral Opportunities to Moral Tests The introduction of subsidies not only can diminish moral opportunities but, under some circumstances, can create additional moral tests. People hold strong beliefs about the limits of economic exchanges. They believe that certain goods are inherently sacred (e.g., body organs) and that treating them as commercial goods by exchanging them for money is inappropriate.16 Were people to accept money in exchange for a good they thought should not be commodified, they would not merely be denying themselves a moral opportunity—​they would also be failing a moral test. In one telling study, researchers surveyed nearly 5,000 Palestinians and Israelis from across the political spectrum, including refugees, supporters of Hamas, Israeli settlers, and national leaders of the major Israeli and Palestinian political factions.17 They asked them to react to hypothetical but realistic compromises in which their side would be required to give away something it valued in return for lasting peace. The researchers chose trade-​offs that they assumed were likely to be rejected and that each party would see as involving sacred values. For example, most of the Israeli settlers surveyed said they would not consider trading any land in the West Bank—​territory they believe was granted them by God—​in exchange for peace.

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More than half the Palestinians thought of full sovereignty over Jerusalem in the same light, and more than four-​fifths felt that the “right of return” was a sacred value, too. The question of interest to researchers was how respondents would answer to being offered a material reward for making the concession. For example, in one scenario, Israeli settlers were presented with the following deal: Give up the West Bank to Palestinians in return for peace and an American subsidy to Israel of $1 billion a year for 100 years.Those who chose to live in the Occupied Territories for its economy or quality of life, namely, those for whom the land was not a sacred value, had an increased willingness to accept land for peace. They also decreased their disgust and anger at the deal and reduced their desire to use violence to oppose it. However, for settlers who believe the Occupied Territories to be God’s ancient trust to them, expressions of anger, disgust, and a willingness to use violence rose markedly when the researchers introduced material incentives. A particularly noteworthy example of the potential of subsidies to backfire is found in the reactions of community members who are requested to host Not In My Backyard (NIMBY) projects, such as power plants, wastewater treatment plants, landfills, prisons, halfway houses, and homeless shelters. These so-​called noxious facilities present a collective action problem in that they provide benefits for everyone but come at a cost to those neighborhoods that host them. The traditional solution to a community’s reluctance to accept these facilities is to tax those who benefit from it and use that money to subsidize those who admit the facility into their neighborhood. However, this approach has not been very successful in getting communities to accept NIMBY projects, and in many cases, it has produced lower acceptance rates than no compensation.18 One example of the latter was economists Bruno Frey and Felix Oberholzer-​Gee’s (1997) study of a Swiss municipality’s reaction to monetary compensation offered for the hosting of a nuclear waste repository. They surveyed the population of a region that was ideal for hosting the storage facility. The researchers asked all respondents if they were willing to permit the construction of a nuclear waste repository in their community. More than half of the respondents (51%) agreed to have the nuclear waste repository built in their community despite the fact that they saw it as a heavy burden for the residents of the host community. Next, the researchers added that the Swiss parliament had decided to compensate all residents of the host community. The amount offered was considerable.The level of acceptance dropped to 25% from 51% when the researchers proposed compensation.Varying the amount of payment had no significant effect on the level of approval. About half of the respondents who initially supported the project seemed to reject the facility simply because financial compensation was now attached to it. Why might someone not accept financial compensation in exchange for hosting a NIMBY project, one that, by definition, threatens the well-​being of community members? The offer of an incentive, in this case, may seem like a bribe—​the offer of money in exchange for putting one’s community at risk.19

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Indeed, in the previously discussed NIMBY study, 83% of those who rejected the monetary proposal explained their opposition by saying they could not be bribed. The offer of money, therefore, may not just remove the potential for identity utility but introduce the potential for identity disutility. In effect, the offer of cash created a moral test, and not only removed a moral opportunity. It made people vulnerable to the perception that they were the type of person who is willing to accept money to do something (e.g., compromise their family’s well-​being) that money should not influence.20 Consistent with the blood donation findings, NIMBY projects fare better when the compensation offered the communities takes a restricted economic form—​for example, a new park or school improvement.21 From the perspective of economic efficiency, restricting the form of compensation to an in-​kind public good should make it less attractive to community members, so why might it be more effective? One answer is that accepting nontraditional payment allows community members to have their cake and eat it too. It permits them to enjoy the identity benefits of contributing to the public good without suffering the identity disutility that comes from being seen either as, on the one hand, a sucker, or, on the other hand, a sellout. Another circumstance when the offer to subsidize compliance generates avoidance motivation is when people feel that accepting money to do something makes them look cheap or mercenary. For example, there are legitimate reasons that a passerby might not abide by a stranger’s request to help lift a sofa into a van. However, the failure of the stranger to offer financial compensation is not one of them. If it were something that the passerby both could do and was appropriate for him to do, then he should do it for free and not allow compensation to influence his calculation (at least a small payment). From this perspective, you might reasonably predict that a person would be less likely to help when offered .50 cents than nothing, as he may worry that compliance would make him seem cheap. The claim that there can be a psychological cost associated with doing something moral for a small financial compensation is supported by the finding that offering monetary incentives to potential whistleblowers can undermine their ethical and social image motivation to respond to others’ wrongdoing.22 There are numerous reasons for not whistleblowing, many of which people might consider legitimate. The failure to receive compensation for the act is not one of them, however. That people’s inhibitions, whether based on fear of what will happen to them or how they will be perceived, could be quelled by a small incentive would not reflect well on them. They would seem opportunistic, not principled.

Accepting Lower Wages to Do Good A survey by Fidelity Investments found that the first wave of millennial workers (those born between 1981 and 1991)  was willing to take an average pay cut of

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$7,600 for a job that offered improved quality of life.23 This finding is supported by other studies that show that people express a willingness to work for less if the work has a social impact. Furthermore, one experimental study showed that people accepted 44% less to work for a task in an online labor market when the employer engaged in socially responsible actions.24 People accept less pay for doing good. There are several explanations for why people require less compensation to do work that has a social benefit, but two are especially relevant to the present discussion. First, because the opportunity to see yourself as doing good provides utility, the amount of the value supplied by financial remuneration need not be as great to make the attractiveness of the job comparable to higher-​paying jobs with no social mission. This explanation suggests that the utility provided by an identity opportunity and a financial opportunity can combine additively. Alternatively, it might be that people are attracted to jobs with prosocial missions, not despite lower salaries but because of them. A  person who makes as much money working for a not-​for-​profit as they would for a for-​profit would find it harder to claim that they are socially driven. One way to think about why people in the nonprofit world may accept being paid less money is because it provides important commentary on their moral status. Getting less for doing “good” actually makes doing “good” more attractive. If they received the same pay as they would for their job in the for-​profit space, people would have difficulty deriving identity utility from their action: People would forfeit the psychological subsidy they received.

Incentives Affect Who Participates Not Just How Many Do Before leaving our discussion of the potential downside of financially remunerating prosocial acts, an additional point needs to be made. Compensation for prosocial acts not only affects how many people undertake them but which people undertake them. Not everyone will derive identity utility from a particular social act, such as donating blood or working for an organization with a social mission. Those who do not see a prosocial act as a moral opportunity are unlikely to be deterred by compensation and are very likely to be attracted by it. Whether compensation will diminish participation in a pro-​social activity then will depend substantially on how many people do versus do not see it as a moral opportunity. The more who do, the greater the risk of reduced participation; the fewer who do, the lower that risk. But those promoting a pro-​social activity may not only care about how many people participate but who participates. For example, one of the arguments against compensating people for blood donation is that those who donate for money are more likely to have transfusion-​transmissible infections. Similarly, there is evidence that while financial incentives for social mission work increase the number of job applicants, they often attract applicants who are less mission-​aligned.25 Compensating pro-​social actions then can crowd out desirable people and crowd in undesirable people.

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Nullifying Moral Tests We have seen that offering financial subsidies to act pro-​socially can sometimes backfire. What about imposing taxes on the failure to act pro-​socially? According to the relative price theory in economics, as the cost of the behavior goes up, the supply of it should go down.26 Given this, if people reacted to pro-​social behavior as they do to most other actions, we should expect that the imposition of taxes on failures to act pro-​socially would increase the incidence of pro-​social behavior. But the fact that economic utility and identity utility interact in complex ways suggests that the effects might not be straightforward. Once again, we will see that the distinction between moral opportunities and tests is helpful when probing this relationship.

Economic Taxes Can Backfire Both financial costs and reputational costs can be expected to deter people’s behavior. A  key question, however, is how do these two types of deterrents interact? Should a social planner who feels that the reputational cost associated with a particular behavior is an insufficient deterrent, consider imposing an economic price (fine or tax) as well? Not necessarily.The imposition of an economic tax can sometimes diminish the reputational cost of the behavior rather than reinforce it. An intervention study conducted in ten private daycare centers in Israel provides a well-​known example of economic taxes backfiring.27 The targeted group was not the children but their parents, many of whom were routinely tardy to pick up their children. The intervention strategy was one of traditional deterrence: The investigators imposed a monetary tax on late-​coming behavior. At six of the daycare centers, they posted the following announcement: As you all know, the official closing time of the daycare center is 4  p.m. every day. Since some parents have been coming late, we […] have decided to impose a fine on parents who come late to pick up their children. As of next Sunday, a fine of NIS 10 [about $4] will be charged every time a child is collected after 4:10 p.m. This fine will be calculated monthly, and it is to be paid together with the regular monthly payment. The remaining four daycare centers served as a control group.The centers imposed the fine in the fifth week of the 20-​week observation period and then removed them in the 17th week. The results were striking. The number of late pick-​ups increased significantly with the imposition of a fine. Moreover, they remained at an increased level, even after the centers removed the penalty. One interpretation of this perverse effect is that the introduction of an economic tax reduced the identity tax that parents had been paying when they

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picked up their children late. Before the fine, tardy parents were failing a moral test by inflicting costs on the other parents and the daycare center staff by being free-​riders. Some of the parents were ready to incur the public and private reputational damage that this failed test carried, but many were not. Once the centers introduced a fine, latecomers were no longer free-​r iding and hence no longer failing a moral test for which they needed to feel guilty:  They were merely paying an economic price for their lateness. Note that this economic intervention likely did not have the same effects on all members of the targeted group: It may have deterred those who had previously come late but liberated a new (and larger) set of latecomers. That is, many of the original tardy parents may have been prompted by the fine to start showing up on time, but a larger group of parents, who had previously been constrained by the moral implications of late-​coming, may have been freed up by the fine. For them, it was no longer a moral test. Experiments on the impact of economic sanctions on the breach of legal contracts provide further evidence that economic taxes can license socially disapproved behavior.28 In a series of experiments, researchers found that people were less likely to perform their contractual obligations when the deal included a liquidated damage clause prescribing the economic penalty for nonperformance than when it did not.Why would specifying a penalty for noncompliance increase noncompliance? It appears that without specifying the consequence, people see their nonperformance of a contract as reflecting negatively on their moral identity (a failed moral test). However, this is not the case when there is an economic price associated with nonperformance.29 An intriguing series of field experiments on the impact of fines on people’s willingness to conserve natural resources, such as forests, grazing land, and fisheries, provides additional support for the claim that regulatory taxes can actually decrease rather than increase conservation efforts.30 Members of communities who feel that free-​r iding, and thereby exploiting a community resource, is failing an identity test as a good citizen, apparently see things differently when authorities impose a tax on such behavior. Free-​r iding ceases to be identity relevant for them; and, their calculation as to whether to free-​r ide or not is now solely an economic one.The new financial cost imposed by the tax may be less of a deterrent than the no-​longer-​present identity  cost.

When Do Sticks Work and When Do They Backfire? That the application of sticks can sometimes backfire and increase rather than decrease the undesirable behavior raises an important question: When do sticks undermine moral tests, and when do they not? The answer is that it depends on many factors too numerous to discuss fully here.31 Below I discuss a few of the factors most relevant to the question of moral identity.

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Fines Work When They Are Deterrence-​Based—​Not Equity-​Based The risk of an economic tax undermining the psychological tax associated with a failed moral test is higher when the fine is perceived to be equity-​based rather than deterrence-​based.32 Equity-​based penalties have two properties. First, they must easily tie to the undesirable action—​that is, every time the behavior is performed, the person receives a fine. Such was the case in the daycare center, where the failure of parents to pick up their kids at the scheduled time automatically resulted in the center charging them a late fee. In the case of deterrence-​based fines (e.g., so-​called “pooper scooper” laws), the connection between the fine and the infraction is far from automatic. It requires the violator to be “caught,” often a low probability event. Second, in the case of equity-​based fines, there exists the perception that the use of the penalty will compensate those who bear the burden of the target’s problematic behavior (e.g., the daycare staff who have to stay late in the case of late pick-​ups). In contrast, the size of deterrent-​based fines is typically prorated, not to the cost of the infraction but to the likelihood of catching the perpetrators. Penalties should most likely undermine moral tests when they are seen as equitable compensation for the violation, not as a deterrent. If it does not have this property, it will not defang the moral test and may provide an even toothier one.

Fines Work When They Eliminate Competing Identity Tests Sometimes, what is keeping people from taking a prosocial action is the fear that doing so requires them to put another valued identity at risk. For example, one reason people free-​r ide despite a preference to share in the production of a public good is the fear of being a sucker. Free-​riding may undermine their identity as a good citizen, but participating when others free ride threatens their identity as someone who is not a sucker.33 Consequently, fining people for free-​riding can reduce this fear and increase their willingness to contribute to public goods. The psychology underlying whistleblowing may be similar. People may feel regretful and incur identity discomfort when they do not report instances of wrongdoing, but still refrain from doing so because they fear others will see them as an informer or opportunist if they do. Introducing fines for failure to report instances of wrongdoing may reduce these latter identity threats, thereby increasing people’s willingness to blow the whistle.

Fines Work When They Reinforce Identity Tests When it is clearly established that an action is morally inappropriate, the imposition of a fine for doing it can reinforce this message and render undertaking the act even more of a failed identity test.34 One example of this is taxing shoppers

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for using plastic bags. Many jurisdictions around the world have imposed such (typically low) taxes with highly effective results. One early example occurred in Ireland when the country introduced a nationwide register tax in 2002. Within weeks, there had been a decrease in plastic bag use of over 90%.35 What accounts for the success of the tax? Perhaps there already was a widespread belief that plastic bag use harms the environment and that it was inappropriate to use them. If this were true, the tax, in addition to functioning as a financial deterrent, might have served as a further expression of the community’s shared moral beliefs.That the government accompanied the imposition of the tax with a publicity campaign featuring slogans such as “Don’t trash the Emerald Isle” likely further reinforced the moral message of the fee.36 Another example of fines strengthening the identity incompatibility of actions is the history of seat belt legislation.37 Research shows that jurisdictions that passed laws making it illegal not to wear seat belts saw fast and effective results. Moreover, research also shows that the effectiveness of these laws was due to reinforcing their preexisting beliefs in the appropriateness of wearing seat belts rather than the financial cost they imposed. As these examples show, the imposition of a material tax frequently generates additional psychological taxes as well, including the stigma of being a scofflaw or a criminal.

Summary Incentivizing behavior through subsidies and taxes can change the identity relevance of those actions in multiple ways. Incentives can be employed by policy agents either to reinforce the identity relevance of behavior or to compensate for it. Incentives can backfire, however. For example, subsidizing contributions to public goods can sometimes reduce rather than increase such contributions. In these cases, it appears the commercialization of them negates the identity opportunity that public-​spirited actions afford. As such, it diminishes the appeal of the behaviors. Subsidizing behaviors can even convert moral opportunities into moral tests if the incentives lead people to feel that they are being bribed.Taxing behaviors can also backfire by increasing rather than decreasing the targeted antisocial acts. In these cases, it appears the commercialization of the action negates the moral identity test that the antisocial behavior represents.The tax becomes perceived as a way to offset the social harm that the act does. Finally, when fees have their desired effect, it often is because the tax imbues the targeted actions with greater psychological disutility, thereby making it more of a failed identity test.

Notes 1 Rigdon (2009). 2 Costa-​Font, Jofre-​Bonet, & Yen (2012); Kamenica (2012). 3 Mellström & Johannesson (2008).

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4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

Kamenica (2012). Glynn et al. (2003). Lacetera & Macis (2010a). Lacetera & Macis (2010b). Costa-​Font, Jofre-​Bonet, & Yen (2012). Frey & Goette (1999). Gneezy, U., & Rustichini (2000b). Heyman & Ariely (2004). Newman & Shen (2012). Kahsay et al. (2015). Carpenter & Myers (2010). Gruber (2004). Daw et al., (2015); Tetlock, Kristel, Elson, Green, & Lerner (2000); Goeschl & Perino (2009). 17 Ginges, Atran, Medin, & Shikaki (2007). 18 Frey & Jegen (2001); Frey, & Oberholzer-​Gee (1997). 19 Kahan (2005); Kunreuther & Easterling (1996). 20 Note that the term bribe most commonly applies to financial offers designed to induce people to perform actions that constitute a failed moral test rather than to persuade people to perform acts that, by the offer of compensation, would no longer be experienced as a moral opportunity. For this reason, typically the amount necessary will be higher in the former than in the latter case. If you design your offer to compensate people for depriving them of a moral opportunity, you need only pay them an amount sufficient to compensate them for their efforts. If you intend your offer to induce people to fail a moral test, you need to pay them for the reputational cost they incur as well as the effort they expend. 21 Kahan (2005). 22 Feldman & Lobel (2010). 23 Eichler (2016/​2018). 24 Burbano (2016). 25 Deserrano (2019). 26 Becker (1968). 27 Gneezy, U., & Rustichini (2000a). 28 Wilkinson-​Ryan (2010). 29 Holmas, Kjerstad, Luras, & Straume (2010). 30 Cardenas, Stranlund, & Willis (2000). 31 See Feldman and Perez (2009), Underhill (2016), and Bowles (2016) for a discussion of many of these. 32 Brickman (1977). 33 Kahan (2005). 34 To read more on the expressive function of the law, see Cooter (1998), McAdams (2000), and Sunstein (1996a). 35 Rosenthal (2008). 36 Bowles (2016). 37 Wittlin (2011).

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9 CHANGING THE IDENTITY RELEVANCE OF BEHAVIOR

People’s dislike of failing identity tests has two important implications for behavior change. First, the incidence of an action will decrease if people come to see taking that action as failing an identity test. Second, the frequency of an action will increase if people cease to see taking that action as failing an identity test. In this chapter, I consider each of these implications in turn.

Making Behavior Identity Relevant Here is a question often faced by people who wish to survey the opinions of the public. How does the offered incentive affect people’s willingness to complete surveys? One review that examined this issue compared the return rate of questionnaires for which (a) there was no compensation offered, (b) payment was provided contingent on the completion and return of the survey, and (c) compensation accompanied the request regardless of whether they completed the questionnaire. The review found that there was a 19% higher return rate when the payment came with the solicitation than when the compensation was contingent on complying with the request.1 In one illustrative study, researchers elicited a response rate of 52%, with an unconditional advance of $5, but obtained only a return rate of 23% when they offered to pay $50 contingent upon completion of the survey. This latter rate was not significantly different than the 21% rate that they obtained when no compensation was offered.2 This seems surprising. Why might people be more likely to comply with the request for assistance when the researchers provided them with a noncontingent subsidy? Their motivation is undoubtedly not the money: They were less likely to accept much more contingent money that would require no more effort of them. One explanation is that the offer of a noncontingent subsidy presented them with

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an identity test: To keep the money without completing the survey threatened their identity as moral actors.3 By first receiving something unconditionally, individuals were now at risk of appearing to be an ingrate if they refused to complete the survey. The example of survey completion shows that an effective way to discourage/​ encourage people from taking/​not taking an action is to convince them that by doing so, they are failing an identity test. There are various ways to do this. One way is to tie the action to a negative identity. Education and knowledge dissemination can be helpful in this regard. This approach is common in the environmental space, where often people who care about the environment do not know which of their actions are environmentally unfriendly. Pointing this out, effectively changing the social meaning of particular behaviors can make behavior identity relevant that previously had not been. One illustration of this is the harmful air pollution effects of idling cars. Campaigns to reduce idling, especially in school zones, have used signs, such as “Idling here is selfish and dangerous” (U.S. E.P.A, (n.d.). These campaigns were effective, at least partially, because they succeeded in framing the act of idling for long periods as a failed identity test for people who care about the health of their children and the planet.4 A second way of changing the meaning of behavior is to link it to an even worse identity.5 Consider littering: Seeing themselves as a litterer may be aversive to people; nevertheless, if the act of littering could link to an even more negative identity, the reluctance of people to litter could be even greater.That is just what the Department of Transportation in the state of Texas did in 1986 when they initiated the “Don’t Mess with Texas” anti-​littering campaign. In this campaign, the phrase “Don’t Mess with Texas” is prominently displayed on road signs and in television and print ads. Additionally, they used the ad in radio announcements, often made by Texas celebrities. The campaign has been highly successful, reducing roadside littering by 72% between 1986 and 1990.6 It remains in full swing, with a website (http://​ dontmesswithtexas.org/​) that provides people with opportunities to participate in cleanups, joint partnerships, sponsorship activities, and to report a litterer. The pitch it gives for undertaking these activities is, “It’s what real Texans do.” This campaign provides a straightforward example of a successful effort to modify people’s motivation to litter. Its goal is to make people more uncomfortable littering. Note that this slogan is effective at making littering a failed identity test only because being a good Texan features prominently in the self-​identity of the target group. This strategy would not be nearly as effective in regions where state identity is less fervent. Consider, for example, the prospects of a “Don’t Mess With New Jersey” campaign. Having lived in New Jersey for many years, I can assert with considerable confidence that such a promotion would not rival the success of “Don’t Mess with Texas.” As another example, consider how governments around the world have tried to reduce smoking. As well as enumerating the various personal health risks of smoking, many countries also require packages of cigarettes to include warnings

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about the second-​ hand harmful consequences of smoking, and not just for unborn children. Many of these warnings seem designed to convince people that by choosing to smoke, they are failing the identity test of being a good parent. The World Health Organization (2020) provides examples, including, “Protect your children:  Don’t make them breathe your smoke” (Czech Republic); “By smoking, you are hurting your family” (Mexico); “Smokers’ children are more likely to start smoking” (Latvia); and “Children start smoking when they see adults smoking” (Venezuela). Other warnings tie the act of smoking to being an inconsiderate and harmful person: “You are not the only one smoking this cigarette” (New Zealand), and “Tobacco smoke adversely affects the health of those around you, especially infants, children, and the elderly. When smoking, be careful not to inconvenience others” (Japan).7 One striking implication of public health campaigns, such as those described above, is their emphasis on the harm to others over the damage to themselves. People appear, at least at times, to value seeing themselves as good parents and good community members more than their physical well-​being. Researchers tested this proposition directly by looking at strategies to encourage handwashing among health care workers in hospitals.8 The researchers compared the effectiveness of signs about hand hygiene that emphasized personal safety (“Hand hygiene prevents you from catching diseases”) or patient safety (“Hand hygiene prevents patients from catching diseases”). Looking at the soap and gel used, the researchers found that the message that emphasized the health of others significantly increased handwashing and did so more than one that emphasized self-​ interest, which did not affect them at all. That making the failure to wash their hands a failure to enact their responsibility as a health-​care professional was more effective than emphasizing its personal cost to them, is truly impressive. The power of linking an action with social harm has also proved an effective means to reduce energy use. Indeed, one study found that emphasizing the social harm (e.g., air pollution) that electricity usage causes proved more effective than a lucrative cost-​saving frame.9 In the studies discussed thus far, the identity tests people are confronted with focus on high-​level identities (e.g., good citizen). They show that if you can make an action or inaction a test of a high-​level identity, you may be able to affect their behavior. This research comports with other research illustrating that emphasis on the ethical dimensions of action also affects people’s behavior. It presupposes (not unreasonably) that people have an identity as a good citizen or moral person and that making an action a test of that identity will affect their inclination to take that action.

Making Public Commitments Publicly announcing your commitment to a particular behavior increases your motivation to enact that behavior.10 One reason for this is that public pledges are a

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way to construct identity tests. Failing to act according to your public commitment means you fail the test of being someone who keeps their word. As such, you are a hypocrite. People actually can use this means of creating an identity test as a way to support their self-​regulation goals. Researchers refer to making a voluntary, public commitment to sustain a commitment to a promised course of action as creating a side bet with the self.11 A side bet is a type of self-​enforcing contract that converts a motivational goal into an identity test by ensuring that the failure to accomplish the objective will result in a threat to your self-​identity. An example of this would be an African American woman who decides to strengthen her resolve to lose ten pounds by way of writing a check for $100 made out to the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). She would give the draft to her friend and tell her friend that if she did not lose ten pounds by her deadline, she should mail the check to the KKK. By making this side bet, the woman has converted her goal of losing ten pounds into a test of her moral identity. Her self-​imposed penalty for failing to reach her goal would be that she would show herself and her friend that she was someone so weak that she would sooner send money to the KKK than stick to her diet. If you would like to impose this type of discipline on yourself, there is now a website (www.stickk.com/​tour) where you can publicly declare a goal, put money in escrow, and have the money sent to a charity if you meet the goal or an anti-​charity if you do not.

Making Your Identity Salient Increasing the salience of a relevant identity can also increase the identity relevance of a behavior. People are more likely to act consistently with one of their identities when it is salient to them.12 There are various reasons why a salient identity could increase consistency of behavior, but one of them is that it makes identity tests more salient to them. For example, labeling someone as an environmentalist may increase their support for sustainability policies by making them more vigilant for behaviors pertaining to environmental sustainability. Priming negative identities can also lead to the framing of a choice as a moral test. Earlier, we saw that the positive identity prompted by the label “voter” made voting more attractive by framing this act as an identity opportunity. Negative identity prompts appear to function similarly, as suggested by the finding that the caution “Don’t be a cheater” was more effective at reducing unethical behavior than the warning “Don’t cheat.” Presumably, the “cheater” language unambiguously framed the situation as a test of a person’s moral identity.13

Nullifying Identity Tests Behavior change occurs not only when circumstances render a behavioral choice an identity test that was not previously one, but when circumstances neutralize

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behavior that previously had been an identity test. An analysis provided by psychologist Kurt Lewin (1951) helps us understand this process. Lewin believed that actions occur in what he called a force field (or, for the individual, a life space), where multiple pressures operate simultaneously on the individual. Some of these pressures push the person in the direction of an outcome or goal—​these are the sources of approach motivation; other forces push the person away from that outcome or goal—​these are the sources of avoidance motivation. Behavior represents the current equilibrium of the system, the point at which approach and avoidance motivations balance each other out in a given moment. All activities, even the simplest and routinized, occur in a tension system. Changing behavior (i.e., changing the equilibrium of the system) requires a change in the force of different tensions. The concepts of approach motivation and avoidance motivation may seem like two heads of the same coin, but they are not. To illustrate the distinction between them and the import of Lewin’s (1951) insight, consider a 1950s quote from Ernest Dichter, a pioneer in advertising research. He wrote: We are now confronted with the problem of permitting the average American to feel moral, […] even when taking two vacations a year and buying a second and third car. (as cited in Whyte, 1956, p. 134) What Dichter was saying here is that Madison Avenue has done what it can with the lever of approach motivation. Now, it has to focus on reducing the avoidance motivation that is keeping people’s approach motivation from expressing itself in behavior. In essence, the task is not to motivate consumption: It is to license it. It is to negate the fear that the act of taking two vacations and buying a second or third car represents a failed identity test. Of course, you could argue that if advertisers were able to increase the desire for their products enough, people would overcome their inhibitions. Although that may very well be true, it still might be more economical to invest in reducing avoidance motivation than in increasing approach motivation. Based on Lewin’s (1951) analysis, we can see that it is critical to know whether the crucial psychology to be engaged in is a motivating psychology or a licensing psychology when confronted with a situation in which you plan to intervene. The most effective strategies for changing behavior are different in the two cases. Specifically, the arguments that motivate people to buy a product are different from those that license them to buy it. Let us see how this analysis works in a particular case. In 1983, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, in partnership with the Ad Council (2020), launched a campaign to reduce drunk driving. Their most successful tagline, introduced in 1990, was “Friends Don’t Let Friends Drive Drunk.” In the first year that the public service announcements included this tagline, alcohol-​related

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fatalities fell nationally by 10%. Furthermore, the slogan went on to become the most highly recognized anti-​drunk-​driving message in U.S. history. How does this intervention influence behavior? It does this by trying to link the act of stopping friends from driving drunk to people’s identity as a good friend. One way it does this is by emphasizing that by letting friends drive drunk, rather than being a good friend, they are a bad friend. It is telling them, in effect, that by not standing in the way of would-​be drunk drivers, they are failing the identity test of being a good friend. However, it also does something else: It seeks to remove a barrier that prevents them from expressing concern about their friends driving drunk, especially when they are resistant to such interference. This mechanism is entirely plausible, for people are notoriously reluctant to stand in the way or to challenge another person’s face, to use a term coined by sociologist Erving Goffman (1959). Such behavior carries with it high psychological and sometimes social costs. Under this interpretation, the friends-​don’t-​let-​friends-​drive-​drunk intervention seeks to make people feel more comfortable intervening and does so by challenging the implication that interference is failing the test of the good-​ friend identity. The beauty of this particular intervention, and perhaps one of the reasons for its success, is that it can work both ways simultaneously. The intervention effectively links the desired behavior with an identity everyone cares about—​that of being a good friend. For people who currently fail to stop their friends from driving drunk because they are unmotivated—​that is, for those who do not care if others drive drunk—​the intervention motivates them to act. For people who are currently inhibited and fail to stop their friends from driving drunk, the intervention provides the license to act. The case of whistleblowing provides another instructive example of the challenge presented by opposing identity tests. As noted previously, two important identities come into play with the prospect of whistleblowing. The first is loyalty: People who report the wrongdoing of someone in their company, group, or organization are potentially failing the test of being a loyal person. The second is fairness: People who fail to report wrongdoing in their company, group, or organization are potentially failing the test of being a fair person who rights wrongs. A group of researchers conducted five studies showing that whistleblowing does represent a trade-​off between the moral values of fairness and loyalty.14 The presence of fairness-​emphasizing individuals and conditions resulted in whistleblowing being more frequent and more supported. In contrast, the presence of loyalty-​ emphasizing individuals and situations resulted in whistleblowing being less frequent and less supported. Encouraging whistleblowing involves reducing the costs, including the identity costs, associated with the act. A critical determinant of whether the whistleblower emerges as a hero or a snitch depends on whether the narrative frame prioritizes loyalty or fairness. Recognizing this, a law firm that specializes in defending whistleblowers has started a petition on change.org to persuade dictionaries and

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thesauruses to abandon their derogatory synonyms for whistleblower in favor of positive terms. The lawyers want the definers of English to replace negative synonyms (representing the failure to act loyally) like betrayer, fink, and snitch with uplifting ones (representing the act of behaving justly) like watchdog, truthteller, and fraud-​buster.15

The Law and Identity Relevance Legal scholars Lawrence Lessig (1995) and Cass Sunstein (1996b) argue that an essential function of law is to regulate the meaning of behavior and that changing the law often changes the meaning of behavior. Stated differently, the law regulates the identity relevance of behavior and changing the law often changes the identity relevance of behavior. One way that laws can change the meaning of behavior is by negating the status of an action as an identity test. One particularly compelling example of the identity relevance of an act changing due to a law is the case of dueling in the Southern United States. Eradicating dueling in the South proved extremely difficult to do. Dueling was a means of resolving disputes or matters of honor for Southern men of a certain social standing. Even though participating in duels was often reasonable for the duelists (as a means of attaining a higher status), it came with a high collective cost, or at least the price was perceived as high by the states that struggled to ban the practice. High legal taxes on dueling, which sometimes included death, had little deterrent value. One problem was the difficulty of enforcing the law. Another was the fact that refusing the challenge to a duel was to fail an identity test. Society branded anyone refusing to duel as a coward and no gentleman: No material tax on conviction for dueling could compete with that. Indeed, Southern males of a particular class simply could not say, “I would love to duel you, but it is against the law,” because society ascribed the code of honor as above laws made by commoners. Consequently, the solution, or at least a more effective solution, according to Lessig (1995), was to make disqualification from holding public office one of the penalties for a dueling conviction. Why was this effective? One of the obligations of the Southern gentleman was a willingness to hold public office. Convicted duelers were unable to fulfill that obligation. Thus, refusing to duel could now be viewed as consistent with, or at least not entirely inconsistent with, the code of honor.The identity threat associated with refusal was diminished. In short, the law functioned not so much to constrain Southern males from dueling as to license them not to duel. Note that this strategy only could have worked if there were a desire among members of the targeted group to extract themselves from the pressure to duel. Indeed, one reason different interventions or remedies are effective at one time when they were not effective earlier is that the motivational underpinnings of behavior have changed. At one point in time, people might be comfortable doing

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what they do, but at a later point in time, they might merely be acting as they always have, even though their feelings have changed.16 Another example Lessig (1995) provides concerning the law undermining an identity test was inducing passengers to wear seat belts in taxis in Budapest during the 1980s. Putting on a seat belt in a taxi in Budapest had a specific meaning—​it was an insult to the driver. For most people, an insult to someone is costly. You feel the pain you are imposing on the other. As such, to insult someone is to fail an identity test as a considerate person, however concerned you may feel for your safety. The way out of this undesirable equilibrium in Budapest was to pass a law requiring that passengers wear seat belts. This may have worked to compel some passengers to do something that they did not want to do. However, in other cases, it served to strip the desired action (wearing a seat belt) of its status as a failed identity test—​the individual no longer insulted a proud person, they just obeyed the law. Still another example provided by Lessig involved the New  York Transit Authority’s efforts in the 1980s to prohibit panhandling in its terminals.The courts struck down a law that made panhandling illegal, violating the First Amendment’s protection of free speech. Then the Transit Authority tried something new. Through a series of public announcements and a poster campaign, the Authority told the public that it was wrong to give to panhandlers—​that panhandlers were people who needed help, but that by giving to them, it made it less likely they would get help. The Authority said that people would help the panhandlers more by not giving money to them. Before the Transit Authority started this poster campaign, the refusal of a passenger to provide any money to a panhandler had a relatively unambiguous meaning—​identifying the passenger as coldhearted, cheap, or uncaring. Now, the refusal could either be because the passenger was coldhearted or because the passenger was motivated to do what was best for the panhandler. And, what is best for the panhandler (according to the posters) was that the passenger should say no to the panhandler. Consequently, the signs succeeded in making it less of an identity test and less costly for the passenger not to give to the panhandler. Lessig (1995) gives many other examples of how the introduction of laws successfully changed the meaning of behavior, thereby licensing people to do what they wanted to do but had been inhibited from doing. One interesting implication of this analysis is that, under some circumstances, people might advocate for laws that would constrain them. That is, they might seek a material tax so as to liberate themselves from a psychological toll.This dynamic can help explain the somewhat puzzling role that some Southern businesspeople played in the 1960s civil rights legislation. According to Lessig, in the hearings surrounding this legislation, many business, restaurant, and hotel owners in the South—​all of them White—​testified in support of legislation that would make it illegal to do what they currently did, namely, not serve African Americans. Why did they want to be forced to do what they would not do voluntarily? The answer can be found in the identity test

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they failed by voluntarily serving African Americans. Willingly serving African Americans made them vulnerable to accusations that they were too greedy or perhaps too sympathetic to Blacks. This psychological cost deterred them from doing something that was in their economic interest. Anti-​discrimination laws, then, licensed them to do what they wanted to do:  serve as many customers as they could. In effect, they were asking for one kind of tax to free them from a more punitive one.

Changing the Meaning of Challenging Bad Actors Laws not only change the identity relevance of performing the act in question, but also the act of confronting those who perform it. For example, a pooper scooper law may be of use, both because of its direct effect on dog owners’ willingness to pick up after their dog, and because of the indirect impact that results from emboldening others to chastise and confront dog owners who do not pick up after their dog. A person will feel less like they are meddlesome or aggressive when they face an irresponsible dog owner if the dog owner’s action violates a law than if it does not. A similar point may occur in the case of the seat belt legislation discussed earlier.Those who shared cars with people who did not wear seat belts might have been more comfortable admonishing their non-​seat-​belt-​wearing driving partners once doing so became illegal. The meaning of admonishment or cajoling is much less negative when it is in the service of observing the law.17

Summary Many behavioral interventions that succeed in changing behavior do so by changing the identity relevance of the targeted actions. These interventions attempt to make people see their decision to do something or to not do something as defining them as, in the first case, someone they do not want to be, and in the second case, someone they do want to be. Campaigns to change behavior often try to tie them to existing powerful identities.They assume that if they can make people see particular conduct (e.g., littering) as incompatible with an especially valued identity (e.g., Texan), they will come to see the targeted behavior as a test of that highly valued identity. Tying conduct to valued identities (e.g., parents) can be useful not only by compelling people to take an action, but by licensing them to take an action. The latter occurs when tying a behavior (e.g., gun opposition) to an identity (e.g., parent) grants people standing to engage in that activity. The identity relevance of behavior can also be changed by legal actions. Laws serve to make behavior more identity relevant, and in some cases, less identity relevant.

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Notes

1 2 3 4

5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

Church (1993). Keating, Zaslavsky, Goldstein, West, & Ayanian (2008). Cialdini (2009) provides many examples of the surprising power of reciprocity pressure. Burztyn et al. (2019) shows how framing failure to pay credit card debt as an injustice decreases delinquency among cardholders. Presumably, this works because customers come to see their failure to pay off their debt as failing a test of an identity (that of a just person) that they value. Miller & Prentice (2013). McClure & Spence (2006). The “good parent identity” was also leveraged to promote children’s seat belt use. Grant & Hoffman (2011). Asensio & Delmas (2016). Ariely & Wertenbroch (2002); Exley & Naecker (2017). Ainslie (1987); Schelling (1978). Lacasse (2016). Bryan, Adams, & Monin (2013). Dungan, Waytz, & Young (2015). Baron (2014). This dynamic, known as a conservative lag, helps account for why public practices often persist long after they have lost private support (Fields & Schuman, 1976). Miller & Prentice (2016).

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As our journey comes to its end, I want to briefly review the book’s central themes and offer some closing observations. The book’s preceding chapters explain and elaborate on two primary ideas.The first is that people make claims, explicitly and implicitly, about the kind of people they are and invest heavily in these claims. The second is that situations relevant to identity claims take two forms: one that provides the opportunity to affirm identity claims and one that tests the validity of identity claims.

The Power of Identity Claims The proposition that people see themselves as representatives of particular social categories and as possessors of individual attributes is neither surprising nor controversial. Indeed, it is not a book-​warranting proposition. What is surprising and book-​warranting, however, is how invested people are in their identity claims. People’s commitments to being a particular type of person—​moral, masculine, a good Republican—​are strikingly powerful. We saw many demonstrations of people’s willingness to incur a considerable financial cost to protect their claims to be moral, fair, and honest. Augmenting their wealth beyond a specific amount does not seem worth it to people if it entails losing self-​or social respect. For instance, we saw that participants in a dictator game would forfeit 20% of the endowment they were given (by voluntarily sharing it with the other participant) to maintain their identity claim to be a fair person. Anti-​American Pakistanis, in a similar manner, were found to be prepared to forfeit almost a day’s wages rather than compromise their anti-​ American identity by making a private expression of gratitude to American beneficiaries. Similarly, we saw that some men and women would instead take jobs that

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paid them less money than ones that made them feel insufficiently masculine or feminine, respectively. People’s willingness to pay such a high financial price to continue to see themselves as they would like is of considerable psychological import. Most significantly, it provides a strong challenge to the view that people are solely economic agents who seek only to maximize profit. The psychological story does not end there, however. Research shows, additionally, how adept people are at seeing their actions as consistent with their identity claims when other, identity-​inconsistent motivations drive those actions. We saw, for example, that people can indulge in much greed and still see themselves as fair, give way to substantial dishonesty, and nevertheless view themselves as honest, and pander to significant racism and sexism and yet regard themselves egalitarian. The research reviewed in this book speaks, thus, both to the power of identity claims to motivate people to behave consistently with those claims and to induce them to rationalize their behavior when it deviates from the dictates of their identity claims. You could interpret the mental gyrations people go through to defend their identity claims as suggesting that people’s identity claims exert little constraint on their behavior. After all, according to this line of argument, it appears that people routinely get to have their cake and eat it too. However, the lengths people go to to defend their identity claims only further attest to the grip these claims have on them. Their cognitive tool kit may provide people with a formidable array of self-​protective tools, but the effective deployment of them requires constant vigilance and considerable effort. Self-​delusion is not cost-​ free. For one thing, we saw that the self-​protective stories people tell themselves could commit them to costly actions down the road. That people are so adept at defending their identity claims speaks not to how lightly these claims weigh on them but to how heavily they do.

Identity Tests versus Identity Opportunities Identity claims engage two types of situations that people continually face as they navigate their social lives: those that provide opportunities to affirm identity claims and those that offer tests of their validity. Identity-​relevant situations do not always cleave neatly into these two types or often share elements of both types, but the distinction is broadly applicable. Once again, identity opportunities are situations that offer an action that, if taken, reinforces or affirms an identity claim. Importantly, however, the potentially confirming act, if not initiated, leaves the person no less confident in their identity.These situations are especially attractive to people when their confidence in their identity claim is threatened or undermined. We saw, for example, that people whose moral identity had been threatened were now willing to undertake prosocial actions that they otherwise would avoid. Similarly, we saw that people whose gender identity had been threatened were now willing to take gender-​affirming steps that they otherwise would reject.

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Identity tests are taken more seriously than identity opportunities by people because, by failing to take the identity-​prescribed action, people risk undermining their identity claim. The capacity of identity tests to leave people feeling less confident in their identity claims (by failing them) is much higher than is their ability to leave them feeling more confident (by passing them). Because of the threat posed by identity tests, people have three options available to them: (a) take actions that constitute passing the test, (b) take steps that allow them to avoid the test, and (c) construe the tests in ways that minimize their status as a test of an identity claim.

Cues to the Status of Situations as Identity Opportunities or Identity Tests One challenge I  have not adequately addressed is how you identify whether a situation provides an identity test or only an identity opportunity. My negligence reflects the difficulty of doing so. As I noted in the preface, the fact is that what makes something an identity opportunity versus an identity test depends on cultural representations and is, to an extent, in the eye of the beholder. Where one person sees a test, another might view it as merely an opportunity, or perhaps as not identity relevant at all. Complicating the situation further, the moral status (and identity relevance) of behaviors frequently shifts. Practices that, at one point in time, were assigned no moral significance, may later become moral opportunities and eventually moral tests. As an example, consider recycling. At one point in the not-​too-​distant past, few people in Europe and North America recycled household waste. Now, most people do. Moreover, recycling has evolved from a moral opportunity to a moral test in many locales. For example, the ratio of recyclers who feel good about recycling (but not bad about not recycling) as compared to those who feel bad about not recycling (but not good about recycling) has reversed. The moral status of behavior can also shift in the other direction. A practice that once served as a moral test or a moral opportunity can cease to be so. The act of donating to panhandlers is a case in point. Increasingly, communities in America have attempted to cast the act of giving to panhandlers as something not to feel good about but as something to feel bad about due to billboard signs, such as “Support panhandlers and you support alcoholism.” The fluidity of moral labels compels people to be sensitive to status changes in behavior. This fluidity is especially true in the case of shifts from moral opportunities to moral tests. People understandably will not be happy to learn that a practice they previously did (or did not) follow with moral impunity has now acquired the status of a moral test, at least in the eyes of others. The attachment of the term politically correct to an action often reflects the creation of a new moral test. To say (lament) that it is no longer politically correct to do something (e.g., tell a racist or sexist joke) is to make two claims. First, that participating in this practice did not previously constitute a failed moral test, and hence not something that you needed

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to feel guilty doing. Second, that following this (politically incorrect) practice now is to fail a moral test, and hence something that you should feel guilty doing. To a large extent, anti-​political correctness sentiment springs from the concern that the number of morally discrediting behaviors is continuously growing and that now society sees formerly acceptable acts as having a moral equivalence to historically condemned actions. For example, unprovoked physical aggression has long been morally unacceptable, but now so are behaviors classified as microaggressions. The expression “you are a credit to your race,” directed at a Black person by a White person, might seem like a compliment to the speaker. Moreover, at one time, it might even have been taken as such. However, now it is commonly experienced as a microaggression because it demeans the target’s race.

The Distinction between Identity Opportunities and Tests: What Does It Buy Us? Given the difficulty of identifying an action as an identity test or an identity opportunity, how much value does the distinction offer us? What are we better able to explain, predict, or understand in light of the opportunity-​test difference? A great deal, I would claim. When we understand this distinction and can identify how people’s perceptions of situations fit with it, we can better predict (a) what they will do in those situations, (b) how they will feel in those conditions depending upon what they do, and (c) how different incentives might affect their inclination to undertake various actions in those situations. If we know that someone sees a circumstance as providing an identity opportunity, we can predict that they are less likely to feel compelled to take the identity-​ consistent action than if they saw it as an identity test. Moreover, we know that they will feel satisfied if they take the identity-​consistent action but not dissatisfied if they do not. Additionally, we know that they will view it as inappropriate for someone to punish them for not taking the identity-​relevant action. Furthermore, we know that if someone offers them a reward to undertake the identity-​relevant action, they may be less inclined to take it. In contrast, we know that if someone sees a situation as providing an identity test, we can predict they will feel more compelled to take the identity-​consistent action than if they viewed it only as an identity opportunity. Moreover, we know that they will feel guilty if they do not take the identity-​consistent action. We also know that they may be disinclined to take the identity-​consistent action if their failure to do so results in a fine that they see as a price to pay. One value of the distinction between moral opportunities and moral tests is the revelation that not all actions that are considered moral take the form of a prescriptive (or descriptive) norm. Moral tests have the force of prescriptive norms; moral opportunities do not. Extreme acts of bravery, generosity, or compassion are morally commendable but typically lack the moral mandate of more moderate actions. People become heroes and role models not by following norms

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but by exceeding them. Their actions win our admiration without prompting us to condemn the less noble actions of ourselves or others. Moral exemplars are future-​selves or possible-​selves, not comparison-​selves. Saying to someone, “you are braver than I am” does not imply that you feel you are a coward. What constitutes required bravery versus unrequired bravery, of course, will be socially constructed and, as such, subject to change. At one point in history, members of the gay community did not commonly view gay individuals who did not publicly acknowledge their sexual orientation as having failed a moral identity test. Coming out of the closet was considered as an act of unrequired bravery, a moral opportunity to be seized. In contemporary times, it still may represent an act of courage, but the gay community increasingly sees it as an act of required bravery. As the following quote from gay advocate Dan Savage (2016) suggested, a gay person who does not come out at this point in history, in the minds of many, has failed a moral test: You have a moral responsibility to be out. It means not being out is a moral failing, but no one can compel you. If you don’t want to be out, you should own that as a moral failing. That said, as much as we know about identity claims and their influence on people’s lives and social relations, there is much more to learn.

Summary This chapter reviews the book’s central themes and offers closing observations. The book develops two main ideas. The first is that people makes claims, explicitly and implicitly, about the kind of people they are and they invest heavily in these claims. The second is that situations relevant to identity claims take two forms: one that provides the opportunity to affirm identity claims and one that tests the validity of identity claims. When we know whether people see identity-​ relevant situations as identity tests or identity opportunities, we can better predict (a) what they will do in those situations, (b) how they will feel in those situations depending upon what they do, and (c) how different incentives might affect their inclination to undertake various actions in those situations. The research reviewed in this book speaks both to the power of identity claims to motivate people to behave consistently with those claims and to induce them to rationalize and atone for behavior when it deviates from the dictates of their identity claims.

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18

INDEX

approach and avoidance motivation 90 avoiding personal identity tests 21–​27; gifts 24–​25; racism, appearance of 26–​27; requests 22–​24; responsibility-​taking 25–​26, 27n3, 28n14, 28n16 challenging bad actors 94 changing behavior 5, 86–​94; creating identity tests 86–​89, 95n4; legislation to change identity relevance 92–​94; nullifying identity tests 89–​92 conscience accounting 44 conservative lag 92–​93, 95n16 contribution ethic 45 dictator game 9–​11, 21–​22, 96 door-​in-​the-​face effect  36–​37 failing personal identity tests 29–​35; accusations of 33–​35; atonement for 29–​ 33, 57–​58, 66 fairness 5, 8–​13, 19n8, 21–​22 foot-​in-​the-​door effect 37–​38, 49–​50 gender identity 63, 96–​97; female 64–​65, 68–​69, 69n14; male 65–​67 gifts 24–​25 high-​level identity  88 honesty 13–​15, 19n12 Hume, D 8 hypocrisy 32, 35, 89

identity labels 47 identity politics x identity tests vs. identity opportunities 3–​5, 6–​7n10, 10, 38–​39n3, 97–​98; difficulty of distinction 98–​99; effects of subsidies 72; perceptions of others 33–​35; relevance of previous actions 35–​38, 49–​50; usefulness of distinction 99–​100 incentives to prosocial acts: corrosive effects of financialization 77; creating moral tests 77–​79, 85n20; nullifying moral opportunities 72–​77; nullifying moral tests 81–​82; reinforcing moral tests 83–​84; strong vs. weak prosocial identity 76–​77, 80; subsidies 71–​80; symbolic versus monetary incentives 74–​76, 79; taxes 81–​84, 99 inner self x instrumental acts 9–​10 Kant, I 6n9 law 92–​94 moral cleansing paradigm 32–​33 moral credentials 41–​43, 46, 55–​57 moral credit 43–​46, 48, 57 moral identity 5, 6–​7n10, 7n13; self-​ scrutiny vs. public scrutiny 18, 23–​24, 42; set points 5, 29 motivating vs. licensing psychology 90

18

19

18

Index  119

neutralizing personal identity tests 40–​50; foot-​in-​the-​door effect 49–​50; identity labels 47; moral credentials 41–​43, 46; moral credit 43–​46, 48, 57; positive vs. non-​negative identity  47–​49

reality-​distorting self-​justification 10–​18, 19n8, 21, 31, 97 requests 22–​24 responsibility-​taking 25–​26, 27n3, 28n14, 28n16

passing personal identity tests 52–​59; credential standards 55–​57; penance standards 57–​58; scope insensitivity to prosocial acts 52–​55 political correctness 98–​99 positive vs. non-​negative identity 47–​49 power of identity 1–​2, 97 prejudice 16–​18; see also racism, sexism previous actions: labeling and 47; moral credentials 41–​43, 46; moral credit 43–​46, 48; positive vs. non-​negative identity 47–​49; test vs. opportunity perception 35–​38, 49–​50 promises 4 proscriptive and prescriptive morality 38–​39n3, 99–​100; cultural 4–​5 public commitment 88–​89

same-​actor doctrine defense 43 scope insensitivity to prosocial acts 52–​55 self-​expressive acts 2, 9–​10 self-​interest  8–​16 self-​perception theory  51n27 self-​regard  21 self-​regulation  5, 89 sexism 43, 55–​56, 64 side bets 89 Smith, A 8, 18 social identity: categories of 1, 60; fuzziness of 61–​63; gender 63–​67, 68–​69, 69n14; priming 67–​69; salience of 3, 67–​69, 89; strength of 2–​3, 60–​61

racism 26–​27, 34–​35, 41–​42, 46, 48–​49, 56–​57, 58

transactional utility 28n12 transgression-​compliance paradigm 30–​31 unwanted identity 2

210