Moral Balancing in Sustainable Behavior

During the “Kirchentag 2019”, a bi-anual festival of the protestant church in Germany with around 200,000 visitors, we investigate the role of the environmental self-image of agents for engaging in climate change mitigation. In a real-effort task at a fair stand of the festival, subjects can generate donations that offset carbon dioxide emissions. Prior to the task, subjects are either positively or negatively manipulated in their environmental self-image. The donations generated in these interventions are compared to a control group. We test whether the manipulation of the environmental self-image induces moral balancing effects (cleansing/licensing) or leads to consistency. Further, we try to determine heterogeneous treatment effects for High and Low environmental/religious types and to test for the impact of type uncertainty on balancing behavior as suggested in the theoretical work of Bénabou and Tirole 2011.
In a second experiment subsequent to the real-effort task, we investigate whether subjects use narratives to justify their effort provision. More precisely, we test if subjects publicly misreport their beliefs about social norms and/or the impact of the real-effort task to enhance their social image.