Report calling green shoppers cheats, cheats green shoppers

In a potentially damaging abuse of statistics, The Daily Mail branded environmentally friendly shoppers as likely to lie and cheat. However this does not appear to be reflected anywhere in the results they cite to backup these bold accusations. Even The Guardian has picked up the story without really thinking about the study.

The central theory seems to be that people have a limited stock of goodwill and that once that's used up for the day, you give up being nice.

Apparently 90 students were paid £5 each to do a study where they were told to buy goods in either a normal online store, or an internet store specialising in environmentally friendly products. They were then given some covert tests that supposedly checked for cheating and stealing.

The people told to shop in an environmentally friendly store apparently stole more money and cheated more often that the people who shopped in the normal store.

However, the participants appear to have been randomly assigned to either eco or normal shopping conditions, therefore in what way does the study compare environmentally-conscious shoppers to non-environmentally-conscious shoppers?

The results do appear to suggest a limited stock of goodwill per person, but they do not demonstrate that everybody has the same goodwill limit.

If there is a finite amount of goodwill per person (which seems unlikely) perhaps many of those who choose to buy environmentally-friendly products have higher daily goodwill allowances to begin with.

The study doesn't differentiate between a random person told to buy an eco-friendly product (average altruism levels) and a person who genuinely wants those products (potentially higher than average altruism levels.)

A much better design for a study would be to group people based on their actual buying habits and then measure altruistic behaviour in other areas of their life.

Besides, isn't it better to steal 50p from a publicity-hungry marketing researcher than to steal a planet from your children?

Do you have a link to the original paper by Nina Mazar? If so, please can you send it this way.

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