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 condition, and group B was supporters who had a chance of expressing others the fact that they’re “Obama Supporters”. Group A and B were given a situation for the experiment.

As chief of police in a small town, you must hire a new deputy. You know that the predominately White officers on the force have negative attitudes toward Blacks, and that hostile working conditions recently led a Black officer to resign. Someone asks you whether you think the job is better suited for a Black person, a White person, or equally well suited to people of both races (Monin & Miller, 2001). What do you say?

On average, Obama supporters in a baseline condition said that the police force job described earlier was equally well suited for both races; by contrast, those who had an opportunity to express their support for Obama said it was better suited for Whites. Presumably, the act of expressing support for a Black presidential candidate made them feel that they no longer needed to prove their lack of prejudice.

Curiosity got the better of me, so I started to research whether supporters of a white president also showed clear moral licensing. The result showed that expressing support for a White democratic presidential candidate (John Kerry) did not produce this licensing effect, nor did identifying Obama as the younger of two presidential candidates without having a chance to endorse him. Neither affirming one’s political views nor being primed with a successful Black figure seem to have been sufficient to produce self-licensing.

The researched showed that the more you represent yourself as ‘Obama supporter’, the more you’re affected by moral licensing. This obvious result is actually the cause of the failure of affirmative action- by moral licensing, affirmative policies make a clear division between "the privileged minorities among minorities" and "un-privileged majorities among minorities". This is mainly caused by moral licensing since policy makers' real purpose is to neutralize minorities' demands for equality, not fulfill them. For instance, if you look at the areas where affirmative action was implemented - college admissions, corporate hiring, government office jobs. etc – you’ll notice that most of them aren't really things that will help you if you've never graduated from high school. Moral licensing is the most typical evidence which proves that prejudice still remains in our unconsciousness. The only way to overcome moral licensing is being aware of these ‘unconscious prejudice’ and striving to open the door of our minds.