LITTER, QUEUES AND MORAL LICENSING

Lately, by the luring of Google’s Ad services using my search history to target the best product for me, I ‘stumbled’ upon Malcolm Gladwell. Further research about him left me with his Podcast, which goes by the name, “Revisionist History”. I sat back and plugged my earphones and started the first episode.

Moral Licensing. It was all about it. Moral licensing is the act of doing something that helps to strengthen our positive image in the society, making us less worried about the consequences of immoral acts or behaviour, and therefore rendering us more likely to make immoral choices.

In the podcast, Gladwell talked about misogyny, or about the hatred of women in authoritarian roles. But let us talk about our daily lives, where moral licensing misleads us driving us farther from our progress towards a better world, or even a better country.

Politics apart, the need for a clean growth-environment for the future generations is indispensable. Every time there is someone to prove to, that he/she does care about the environment, they use the trashcans. Since this particular event, as simple as it may be, such as disposing of ice-cream cups into the trash, has proved to themselves that they are morally strong, this often delusionally makes them abandon such morality in future events. The argument that doing one good, can only bring about more good out of it, fails most of the time as the glitch of moral licensing comes into play. To put it in simple words, for once if someone uses the trash, most of the time, this event where they were good to the environment, automatically licenses them to litter, reasoning themselves with the one time they were moral, even though such cases maybe in the face of emergencies.

Queues. Let us now talk about queues. It is okay to understand that waiting in long lines makes people angry, frustrated, bored. But the whole concept of queues was to be fair to the system of whatever service it may be providing. And people are lying if they say they have always been fair in a queue. Every person has at least one time jumped a queue or has quarrelled with a jumper. To make it more realistic, consider a metropolitan like Chennai, the city is full of queues. Let’s narrow it down to the sub-urban train ticket counter. It was noon, with every commuter tired and wanting to get out of the large commotion of people. A woman approaches a guy, who is in the middle of the line to help her jump in line, apologising for it calling it an emergency. The guy lets her in and hears mumbling behind him. A few seconds later, another woman also approaches the same guy and asks him if she could cut in. But this time, he refuses, along with support from people from the behind. Why did the guy do this? This is a true incident and I was just behind this guy. Let’s break it down. The first time he was approached, the guy felt a need to prove himself( and to others probably), that he was a good person. So he allowed the first one to cut in, helping her in an emergency, even though he never knew if it was one. Once he had proved that, he moral-licensed himself. Then when the second woman approached him, he was okay to take immoral decisions now(this whole morality is based on his morals and are not universal). So he declined to offer help and other people joined in over the frustration of being ‘fooled again’. This is what moral licensing does to individuals which also reflect on a group.

Moral licensing puts you behind on every aspect of life. From cheating yourself by having a heavy meal for lunch, appreciating your ability to be on a diet plan, to postponing assignments because you have been studying hard, it is always a roadblock to success, be it an individual’s or a nation’s.

Unless we all strive hard to abandon our psychological need to preserve our self-image, in the face of our conformity, we cannot achieve a successful career, life, nation or a better world to live in.