When virtue leads to villainy: advances in research on moral self-licensing

• Acting virtuously can make people feel licensed to act less-than-virtuously.
• A license may come from good intentions, foregone sins, or an ingroup's good deeds.
• People can strategically create evidence of their virtue when they need a license.
• Evidence that you are not a sinner can free you to sin.
• Conversely, evidence that you value saintliness may inhibit you from sinning.

Acting virtuously can subsequently free people to act less-than-virtuously. We review recent insights into this moral self-licensing effect: first, it is reliable, though modestly sized, and occurs in both real-world and laboratory contexts; second, planning to do good, reflecting on foregone bad deeds, or observing ingroup members’ good deeds is sufficient to license less virtuous behavior; third, when people need a license, they can create one by strategically acting or planning to act more virtuously, exaggerating the sinfulness of foregone bad deeds, or reinterpreting past behavior as moral credentials; and fourth, moral self-licensing effects seem most likely to occur when people interpret their virtuous behavior as demonstrating their lack of immorality but not signaling that morality is a core part of their self-concept.