Self-licensing

And psychologists actually have a name for it.

It's called moral licensing.

It's when you do something that feels good or virtuous and you feel like you've earned the right to go and ease off somewhere else.

And I think if we actually reflect, you know, we can picture that.

Tell me about that.

Yeah, so I think this was leveraged by Theranos in a way where it is this idea of moral licensing of, hey, look, we are doing such great things for the world.

We are providing a painless, more affordable, more accessible health care diagnostic.

And so there's no possibility for us to be doing anything wrong and in fact we are doing so much good even though we are doing wrong we can rationalize it and justify it and try and conceal it behind closed doors because look at all of this benefit that we are providing for people and i think that Often this gets used as a shield or a justification for the fact that, hey, actually, you have this whole iceberg of issues kind of going on below the surface, and maybe we should address those instead of... just kind of portraying ourselves as these angelic beings that are here to save everyone.

Does that mean that the safest company to work for is the one with a boring mission?

with a boring mission, maybe not with a boring mission, but definitely one in which the organization is not sort of entangled in the sort of cult of personality and really leveraging it's like good doer.

identity to just make it seem like it's just this organization of of perfection i still believe in good missions i still believe in good visions um and again this is just one concerning thing moral licensing is one concerning thing amongst a whole slew of factors that often will contribute to the downfall of a company

Let's say someone out there watching just started a job this month and something already feels off.

The halo effect is a cognitive bias where one strong positive impression of a person influences how we judge everything else about them, right? In other words, they're excellent in one area, so we're willing to give them a pass in other areas of their life as well.

Sometimes character and conduct are segregated because of moral licensing.

Moral licensing is a psychological effect where doing something perceived as good gives people subconscious permission to later do something that's questionable or selfish or hypocritical while still feeling like a good person.

Think about King David, right? That while everybody went off to war in one season of his life, he stayed behind.

And what immediately happens? And by the way, the text sets it up and basically points a big finger at David.

I learned that there's a thing called hedonic adaptation, that each of us have a set point that automatically oscillates our positives and negatives and brings us back.

We also have a moral licensing effect.

Any time we get proud, we give ourselves permission to do something to undermine it to make sure we feel shame to get us back in equilibrium.

When we do something with shame, we do something to go pride.