BYOB: Bringing Your Own Shopping Bags Leads to Indulging Yourself and the Environment

As concerns about climate change and resource availability become more central in the public discourse, the use of reusable grocery bags has been strongly promoted as an environmentally and socially conscious virtue. Thus it is useful to ask whether adoption of this behavior could subconsciously influence consumers’ in-store choices (e.g. Dijksterhuis et al. 2005). As a physical reminder of a virtuous act, reusable bags might be assumed to prime shoppers’ attention or motivation towards environmentally responsible products. Similarly, bringing one’s own bags could be self-signaling, suggesting to the consumer that they themselves are “green” or “good”, leading to a higher spend on organic or healthy foods and possibly avoiding indulgent ones, for the sake of consistency. However, we propose that as an indicator of a virtuous self, bringing a bag gives shoppers permission to make less virtuous choices. Such a result is consistent with licensing effects, in which a virtuous action in one domain allows individuals to select indulgences in subsequent choices (Fishbach and Dhar, 2005, Khan and Dhar 2006). Here we demonstrate support for both priming and licensing effects of bringing one’s own grocery bags via a combination of experimental studies and empirical analysis of real world shopping data.