Mental Money Laundering: A Motivated Violation of Fungibility

People exploit flexibility in mental accounting to relax psychological constraints on spending. Four studies demonstrate this in the context of moral behavior. The first study replicates prior findings that people donate more money to charity when they earned it through unethical versus ethical means. However, when the unethically earned money is first “laundered”—the cash is physically exchanged for the same amount but from a different...