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Problems associated with social interaction and various forms of social exchange have been particularly important to master for successful adaptation. Consequently, rules governing social exchange has shaped human cognition, heuristics, biases, and reasoning abilities (Cosmides, 1989; Tooby and Cosmides, 1996; Hoffman et al., 1998; Kiyonari et al., 2000; Yamagishi et al., 2007; Cosmides et al., 2010). One aspect that might be particularly important, for our purpose here, is the rules governing the balance between giving and receiving favors. People expect reciprocity in interpersonal relationships – when they give something, they generally expect something in return, and when they get something they feel obliged to return the favor. Lack of balance in give-and-receive transactions of a relationship makes people sad and compromises health and wellbeing (Buunk and Schaufeli, 1999). Neglecting the balance in a relationship by receiving more than one gives can lead to shame and guilt, and giving more than one receives can lead to anger. However, the balance can be restored when the one in debt do what is necessary to compensate for past transgressions (Xu et al., 2011).

Because of the importance of social exchange during human evolution, natural selection has shaped human cognition to compute and seek balance in social exchange efficiently. Specifically, natural selection has made this kind of moral accounting important, and formed a balancing heuristic that simplifies cognition concerning interpersonal cooperation by calculating the balance in social transactions. This balancing heuristic still influences the way people think today. For example, people often take action to maintain balance between “good” and “bad” deeds – actions that can be observed in human moral decision-making (Sachdeva et al., 2009). Morally righteous and unrighteous decisions appear to be mentally accounted for as if they balance each other out. For example, prior good deeds can “license” latter choices of a more self-indulgent character (Khan and Dhar, 2006).

Moral accounting and balance seeking behavior not only apply to social relationships, they seem to apply to environmental issues as well. Some people are more likely to cheat and steal after purchasing “eco-friendly” products (Mazar and Zhong, 2010), probably because they feel licensed to do so since they morally account the “eco-friendly” choice as a “good” deed. Moral licensing has also been observed in the context of cooperation for the good of the environment (Sachdeva et al., 2009). When people are reminded of deeds they have done that they know were harmful to the environment, they might be left with a feeling of “eco-guilt” (Mallett, 2012). People who experience eco-guilt seek pro-environmental actions to compensate for this guilt and restore balance. In their search for such a balance, people are inclined to believe in “quick-fixes,” because they want to re-establish the moral balance and escape the guilt as quickly and easily as possible. In the same way that cognitive dissonance may make people change their attitudes to reduce inconsistencies between attitudes and behavior, people may also change their evaluation of past environmentally burdening behaviors and future environmentally friendly behaviors to restore the balance in their relationship with the environment. For instance, people are more likely to sign a petition addressing environmental issues after viewing evidence of human-caused environmental damage (Rees et al., 2015). Hence, the balancing heuristic of the moral accounting seems to have been generalized to human-climate interactions although such interactions are evolutionary novel.

In social exchange, allowing give-and-take transactions to balance each other out works well to maintain well-functioning cooperation. However, the same balancing rule is not appropriate to apply to “environmentally friendly” and “harmful” behavior. When people experience a negative imbalance from having done something harmful to the environment, they may actively seek an opportunity to do something good for the environment to restore the balance. However, the environment is a complex system of processes that does not respond like a person in a reciprocal relationship. Also, and foremost, environmentally harmful behavior can neither be compensated for, restored nor undone. While the tension in a relationship, caused by a harmful action to another person, can be restored by compensation without leaving permanent changes in either person, harmful actions on the environment have permanent consequences. Flying adds to an individual’s total environmental burden, no matter how many meat free Mondays that individual has. Still, “compensatory green beliefs” are widespread in the general population (Kaklamanou et al., 2015). The balancing heuristic may make people purchase more “eco-labeled” food in order to do something good for the environment, but the best thing for the environment would of course be to consume less overall. Consuming more of something is never the best way to reduce one’s own environmental impact, even if the produce is marketed as “environmentally friendly.” In the same spirit, attempts to cancel the guilt from “harmful” deeds, by avoiding taking too hot showers, or driving vehicles that run on “sustainable fuel” might make people feel good about themselves. However, the behavior can cause even more harm to the environment, if showers instead go on for longer and people take the car to work more often (cf. rebound effects; Chitnis et al., 2013).

The balancing heuristic is not only applied when people reason about their own behavior and choices – it also generalizes to items and objects. When so-called “environmentally friendly” items are added to a set of “conventional” items, people believe the environmental impact of the whole set is reduced. For instance, people intuitively think the environmental burden of a hamburger and an “organic” apple in combination is lower than the environmental burden of the hamburger alone (Gorissen and Weijters, 2016). People mentally account for the “environmentally friendly” and the more “harmful” objects as if the objects balance each other out rather than sum up together (Holmgren et al., 2018a,b). This averaging principle leads to quantity insensitivity with regard to the amount of “environmentally friendly” objects in the set. For example, people tend to think that the environmental burden of a car pool remains the same when hybrid cars are added to the pool, as if numbers do not matter as long as the cars are seemingly friendly to the environment (Kim and Schuldt, 2018). One interpretation of this is that the balancing heuristic makes people think that the climate friendlier objects compensate for the more harmful ones, in the same manner as it does for evaluations of people’s own deeds.

The complexity of the problem is too large for people to understand the effect of their consumer choices, traveling behavior, recycling efforts, and lifestyles on climatic change. Without access to more detailed information, such as life cycle analyses of the products in the grocery stores for instance, people apply the balancing heuristic to guide intuitive judgments and decision-making toward what they think is an overall averaged environmentally friendly behavior. People who experience guilt, from environmentally questionable behavior, will seek what they think are sustainable behaviors as an instrument for restoring moral balance. The balancing heuristic may lead people into believing that the more they do of something “environmentally righteous,” the more environmentally friendly they are—since they build up their moral account (cf. Sachdeva et al., 2009). However, although buying a bundle of eco-labeled bananas is better for the environment than buying the same amount of conventionally grown bananas, it is worse than not buying any bananas at all.

One way to help people make more sustainable decisions on the individual level would be to give consumers feedback on the carbon footprint of the wares they are about to purchase, for example by taking advantage of self-scanning systems, where customers scan their products themselves before paying for them. In addition to the accumulated price with each product, the system could also provide the customers with an accumulated carbon footprint estimate of their wares. That way, the costumers receives immediate feedback saying that “eco-labeled” products do not reduce but add to the accumulated carbon footprint of what they are buying. Giving direct and concrete feedback about the effect of consumer choices can work in an informational way as well as in a way that nudges people to make better choices (Linder et al., 2018). Simple aspects of the design of public places, like a paper towel dispenser that shows a green map of Africa, which slowly fades away for each towel dispended, can affect the choice architecture and thus promote environmentally friendly behavior.

Another approach would be to run information campaigns that make people aware of the misleading concepts of “climate compensation” and “environmentally friendly.” The balancing heuristic makes people susceptible to the influence of media communication and policymaking that tell people how to behave (Leiserowitz, 2006; Moser, 2009) and to marketing devices such as “moral labeling” (de Pelsmacker et al., 2005; Yiridoe et al., 2005). Words such as “environmentally friendly,” “eco-friendly” and “ecological” run the risk of establishing a public view that objects, behaviors and decisions with these labels are “good” rather than “less bad” for the environment (Holmgren et al., 2018b).

To overcome the balancing heuristic as a cognitive barrier to sustainability, we need to make people deal with the source of the problem instead of seeking ways to compensate for it, in part through education and information campaigns. The cognitive barriers are sometimes hard to break down, however, because people are not prepared to spare what is needed to deal with the source of the problem. Population growth is one of the major driving forces of future climatic change and legislations to prevent population growth would mitigate climatic changes, but such legislations are likely to be met with both ethical, political, and religious arguments (cf. van Vugt et al., 2014).

Being eager to avoid environmental imbalance and eco-guilt may not only make people ready to believe in environmental “quick-fixes.” Importantly, it may also affect people’s readiness to perceive an imbalance, or guilt, in the first place. Realizing the environmental impact of one’s own behavior is challenging, as much emotionally as cognitively. The “ostrich effect” – the tendency to selectively reject available inconvenient information, for example by ignoring the environmental impact of one’s own behavior, is a way of avoiding guilt and moral imbalance in the first place. This tendency makes it important to inform the public about the climate changes in the right way – to stress the severity of the problem enough to make people understand the problem, but not so much that it makes people reject the information.

The behavioral patterns that follow from the balancing heuristic influence decisions not only on the individual level but also on macro levels. Nations may justify weaponry exports to dictatorships by also enacting climate-change alleviation interventions in the third world. Companies license their carbon emissions by buying carbon offsets while also building customer loyalty and market their brand as “environmentally responsible.” Restaurants serving nothing but red meat may market themselves as “100% climate compensated” which attracts customers who wish to eat hamburgers without experiencing eco-guilt. A sharpened legislation of marketing of products, choices, as well as economic devices for emission regulation as if they are “environmentally friendly” alternatives, is necessary to deal with this problem. The present jurisdiction governing these devices do not fully consider their psychological consequences. Calling a hamburger restaurant “100% climate compensated,” for example, may deceive people into believing that eating dinner at that restaurant has no environmental burden. Also, things that are gentle for the closest environment (like organically produced meat) are not necessary gentle on the climate, which calls for more precise climate related labeling of products. A stricter legislation of marketing devices and an obligatory carbon footprint estimate of products could be one way to better guide people’s behavior (cf. Steiner et al., 2017), companies and nations away from environmentally harmful behavior they do when they try to do good for the environment.