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This paper explores whether previous good deeds may license non-cooperative behavior such as damaging a social surplus for private benefits in Madagascar. We designed a two steps framed experiment, with one control and three treatments. In the first step, the three treatments consist in a task that enables subjects to earn moral credit, whereas the control group just has a neutral task (i.e. unscrambling sentences). The three treatments differ in the framing of the “moral boosting” task. In the second step, subjects are given the possibility to take an amount from a fund allocated to their University. We show that participants in the license condition adopt higher anti-social behavior than participants in control. First, the number of participants who decide to take money from the University’s fund increases under the license condition, and second, the average amount taken is significantly higher than in the control condition, even when only takers are considered. The framing of the preceding task seems to have little impact on self-licensing. However, a low degree of implication encourages greater morally dubious behavior. Finally, we found that license effect exists both for men and women, while the increase of anti- social behavior after a good deed is more pronounced for men.

According to the so-called ‘self-licensing effect’, committing to a virtuous act in a preceding choice may lead to behave less virtuously in the succeeding decision. Consequently, well-intentioned policies can lead to overall counter-productive effects by licensing people to behave badly in related behaviors. On the other side, motivational crowding theory argues that constraining people to adopt a desirable behavior can backfire. We use of a classroom experiment to test whether a regulatory framework to incentivize individuals to adopt pro-environmental behavior generate similar spillovers in terms of licensing effect than a non-regulatory framework. We show that the way the good deed is caused doesn’t seem to influence the licensing effect. Nevertheless, we found that business- and environmental-orientated majors react adversely to the regulatory framework. We show that environmental-orientated students exhibit higher intrinsically motivations than business-orientated ones. Accordingly, we suggest that the licensing effect is more likely to arise when the preceding ‘virtuous’ act is freely chosen (respectively regulatory caused) for non-intrinsically (respectively intrinsically) motivated individuals.