Licensing via Credentials: Replication Registered Report of Monin and Miller (2001) with Extensions Investigating the Domain-Specificity of Moral Credentials and the Association Between the Credential Effect and Trait Reputational Concern

Abstract

The moral credential effect is the phenomenon where an initial behavior that presumably establishes one as moral “licenses” the person to subsequently engage in morally questionable behaviors. In line with this effect, Monin and Miller (2001, Study 2) found that participants who initially had an opportunity to hire a job candidate from disadvantaged groups (vs. those without such an opportunity) subsequently indicated preferences that were more likely to be perceived as prejudiced. We conducted a direct replication of this study with US participants on a crowdsourcing platform (n after exclusion = 932). We found no support for a consistent moral credential effect: the effect was close to zero in a scenario where participants indicated their preferences to hire from different ethnicities (d = 0.02 to 0.08, depending on inclusion criteria), and was in the opposite direction in a scenario where they indicated preferences for different genders (d = –0.50 to –0.38). With two extensions to the original study design, we found no evidence that domain-inconsistent moral credentials are less effective in licensing than domain-consistent moral credentials and that moral credentials moderate the association between reputational concern and expressing potentially prejudiced preferences. All materials, data, and analysis scripts are shared at https://osf.io/phym3. This Registered Report has been endorsed by Peer Community In Registered Reports: https://doi.org/10.24072/pci.rr.100726.

Keywords

• moral licensing
• moral credentials
• morality
• replication
• reputation concern