I’m on thin ice telling Guardian readers that being an ethical consumer makes you irritating, but you can’t argue with science. In a recent study, US researchers offered people various information before buying jeans, but said they could only know two of the following: price, style, colour, and whether child labour was involved. Those who chose not to learn about child labour were asked to assess the kind of person who would. Did they judge them to be more sexy, stylish or charismatic? No: they found them unattractive, boring and odd. Life – unlike the labour practices behind your ethical wardrobe – isn’t fair.
Still, it’s clear what’s happening here, and it ought to offer ethical types some solace. It’s called social comparison theory. The non-ethical shoppers knew they should care about child labour but didn’t want to think about it, so felt threatened by those who did. And no, it’s not that ethical shoppers are just insufferably smug and therefore annoying. Another part of the study confirmed the theory: when people were given the chance to make a donation to charity at no cost to themselves, they didn’t feel the need to put others down. “They’d had a chance to shore up their ethical identity,” researcher Rebecca Reczek told Harvard Business Review. “[So they] didn’t experience the same sense of threat.”
When it comes to making the world a better place, this is dispiriting. It’d be nice to think that making ethical choices inspired others to do the same. And it’s true that outstandingly moral people – Nelson Mandela, for example – do serve as inspiration. But that’s partly because we rarely compare ourselves to them. You didn’t have the option of suffering in jail to lead South Africa out of apartheid, so there’s no shame in the fact that you didn’t. By contrast, small-scale virtuous behaviour – the kind we could emulate, if we could be bothered – triggers comparison and guilt. The end result is that we’re less motivated to be virtuous. Having dismissed ethical consumers as tedious weirdos, study participants were less angry about child labour than before.
The underlying problem goes way beyond shopping. Faced with any ethical outrage, there are two ways to make your negative feelings go away. One is to address the outrage; the other is to try not to think about it – as with the people who chose not to learn about child labour. You can deal with the horrors of factory farming by becoming vegetarian – or by not hanging out with vegetarians who bang on about factory farms.
Yet there’s cause for optimism. After all, those “non-ethical” shoppers weren’t really non-ethical: they only reacted how they did because they knew ethics mattered. Just don’t try to persuade such people by telling them their choices are evil. To assuage their guilt, they’ll block that message out – or conveniently convince themselves you’re a freak.
• Oliver Burkeman explores the phenomenon of feeling like a fraud in The Impostors’ Survival Guide on BBC Radio 4 on 26 April at 11am and 2 May at 9pm.
