Moral licensing and the first African American president of United States
Good deeds reframe bad deeds. Moral Licensing - justifying actions that are immoral, unethical, or otherwise problematic by doing good deeds in the past – has been documented in various domains in our lives. Revisionist History showed that several examples of moral licensing existing in politics, and I was curious about whether moral licensing also affected supporters of Barak Obama – the first African American president in US history. America’s president – the most powerful in the entire world – is the face of America. Since Declaration of Independence, the seat was only for whites. Since Barak Obama was first to brake that ‘tacit agreement’, I thought that there must be a moral licensing in there: support for Barack Obama just before the 2008 election could license people to make ambiguously racist statements. To test this there was an experiment conducted among supporters of Obama. Supporters were then divided into two groups – group A was supporters in a baseline conditi...