Ethics Education, Moral Attentiveness and Consumer Wisdom: Exploring the Relationships

Abstract

Ethics education has recently garnered a great deal of attention; it has been viewed as a remedy against a plague of diverse forms of immoral practices carried out by businesses and consumers. Markedly, ethics education has proved its effectiveness in influencing students’ moral cognition and behavior as future business practitioners. However, the effect of being exposed to ethics courses on students as consumers has not been investigated yet. Thus, a post-only quasi-experimental design was conducted to examine such an influence on the dimensions of moral attentiveness and consumer wisdom; as cognitive and behavioral constructs respectively. Results revealed that ethics education had a positive influence on students’ reflective moral attentiveness as well as two dimensions of consumer wisdom, which are purpose and perspective. Finally, the research provides theoretical and practical implications as well as directions of the available research avenues for future researchers.