Moral Self-Licensing and the Direct Touch Effect

Repeated experiments with a time span of one week between repetitions are used in order to test two related hypotheses. The first is the moral self-licensing effect, which describes people's tendency to allow themselves to act more selfishly on the back of previous prosocial or selfless behavior. The second is the direct touch effect, which describes the difference between experiences perceived directly by the senses and those perceived in a more hypothetical or abstract way. As games in which both effects can be detected we use the standard trust game and the mutual gift-giving game. Preferences were elicited by the strategy method and both games were played with and without feedback information between the waves. In both games, the moral self-licensing effect as well as the direct touch effect could be observed. Finally, we use a solidarity game to check whether these effects also determine behavior in situations with a different social norm. We find that this is not the case