The slippery slope that begins with an eco-purchase

NEXT time you put a green product in your shopping trolley, make sure any virtuous feelings don’t go to your head. In an experiment, people making a green purchase became more likely to cheat and steal, as if an act of environmental virtue is an excuse for vice elsewhere (see “Exposed: green consumers’ dirty little secrets”). The finding may have a bearing on why it is so hard to change people’s behaviour. If real-word efforts to go green are affected in the same way, we need to find new strategies to encourage green consumption. Virtue, it turns out, is…