Green equals mean

The Guardian has reported today on a study claiming that people who opt for green products are meaner than consumers of standard products. The study, Do green products make us better peeople?, was carried out by Nina Mazar and Chen-Bo Zhong at the University of Toronto. It states that: "People act more altrusitically after mere exposure to green than conventional products. However, people act less altruistically and are more likely to cheat and steal after purchasing green products as opposed to conventional products."
Taking this piece of research at face value leads me to assume that a sizeable chunk of the Greenbuild News readership are criminals, specifying sustainable building products to make themselves feel better about the armed robbery.
The report seems to be suggesting that we all have a limited amount of goodness within, and if we use all that up on cutting carbon emissions or buying recycled materials then we must, somehow, find a balance. I bought some low-energy lighting today so I'll have to kick a puppy on my way home, that kind of thing. If, however, I'd just casually leafed through a catalogue of low-energy lighting, the puppy would be free to live a full and healthy life.
I'm all for the wonders of academia, but this study does seem a little, well, meaningless. For a start, my idea of a green product may be significantly different to yours and, as far as I know, nobody has come up with a globally accepted definition of what green really means. The final conclusion the authors come to is that green products do not necessarily make us better people. Is that really so shocking? After all, Hitler was an animal-loving vegetarian (possibly).