Name: Moral Licensing
Uploaded: 2020-03-28T09:00:10.000Z
Duration: 28 min 28 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

To-infinitive

Moral psychology isn't always an easy thing to study.

doesn't always reveal what they would do in real life.

but researchers must always balance the benefits

with the safety and well-being of the people they study.

Secondly, what we learn from moral psychology experiments

For example, today we're going to look at moral licensing:

the theory that when you do something good...

you subconsciously feel you've earned a license

I've been working  with Dr. Kyle Stanford,

from the Department of Logic  and Philosophy of Science

at the University  of California, Irvine,

on a way to observe  moral licensing in the wild.

So I want to see moral licensing in effect.

I want to see people who have been led to believe,

through their own actions, that they're good.

and they give themselves credit for the moral...

But none of that is happening consciously, right?

So we shouldn't imagine that a person who's engaged

in moral licensing is asking themselves in their head...

...what should I be? Does it make me a good person?

But it is going on, and they don't experience it.

-They don't know that it's happening.  -Right.

I think we're going to learn a lot today.

[Michael] So here's how  the moral licensing test

First, we're going to take  this beautiful park

Next, we've hired  some unsuspecting actors

who think they're going to film  a public service announcement

it will be obvious  that the trash is a problem.

We just need to clean up this little alleyway right here.

Will they do a good deed  and earn some moral credit

by volunteering to help  pick up the trash, or not?

each participant will be asked  to wait in a separate area

There, our confederate Cameron,  who appears to be homeless,

Meanwhile, Dr. Stanford and I  will be watching

behind the scenes to observe  how our subjects react.

keep their subconscious  moral scorecards balanced

or feeling like they don't need  to give money if they did?

We normally sort of never ask this, but...

we've got, like, all this stuff that we're trying to clean up.

I'm going to grab some gloves. I was wondering,

-and we can get this thing going. -Let's do it. Let's do it.

Yeah, this is just what we wanted to do today.

It looks like someone had a good time, though.

[Michael] All right, so picking up the trash.

How do you think that's currently sitting

He's thinking of himself as having done a good deed

that he didn't need to do, that he didn't have to do.

[Michael] Then it was time  to shoot our PSA.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

Moral Licensing

scenario

situation

experiment

philosophy