Morality Matters in the Marketplace: The Role of Moral Metacognition in Consumer Purchasing

Abstract

To better understand the seemingly inconsistent influence of consumers' morality on their marketplace behaviors, we apply insights from research on attitude moralization to the consumer domain. That is, rather than predefining certain products as “moral,” this approach treats morality as the extent to which individual consumers metacognitively perceive their positive product attitudes as rooted in moral (vs. non-moral) considerations. Across multiple studies (N = 1,105), a wide variety of product categories, and multiple methodological approaches (i.e., correlational, experimental, and longitudinal), we show how the degree to which consumers perceive a moral basis for their product attitudes robustly predicts their intended and actual marketplace behaviors. Importantly, these findings hold above and beyond overall attitudes, other metacognitive assessments (e.g., certainty and ambivalence), and explicit product quality. By extending prior research in moral social cognition to the consumer domain, we provide a more refined account of morality's role in consumer behavior.

Hypocrisy in ethical consumption

“…More generally, ethical spending, personal boycotts, and ethical investment have all seen rapid growth in recent years (e.g., Carrigan et al, 2004 ; Webb et al, 2014 ). However, it is worth noting that a substantial intention-behaviour gap is often found ( Carrington et al, 2014 ), consumers can hold different moral considerations for the same products ( Luttrell et al, 2021 ), and people sometimes choose to avoid ethical information when consuming ( Reczek et al, 2018 ). There are thus competing motives at work when people consider the ethics of consumption.…”

Do consumers care about morality? A review and framework for understanding morality's marketplace influence

“…To help with identifying whether an attribute, product, or brand has been moralized, managers can use a single-item question in consumer surveys to ask the degree to which an attitude toward a relevant topic is "a reflection of your core moral beliefs and convictions" (Luttrell et al, 2021;Skitka et al, 2021). However, even without soliciting this more specific data, this review outlines four common qualities likely to be associated with moralized attitudes: emotionality, value-relevance, identity-relevance, and negative valence.…”

“…Past work has found that individuals can be led to moralize their attitudes, even if those attitudes did not originally have a moral basis (Luttrell et al, 2016; see also Wisneski & Skitka, 2017). Although such efforts are more difficult than simply activating one's already moralized attitude, inducing moralization should make consumers more likely to act in attitude-consistent ways (Luttrell et al, 2021). Previous research would recommend connecting participants' sense of morality to the respective attitude through the moderators outlined in this review.…”

“…In other words, whereas the attributelevel and person-level approaches define morality in a top-down manner, the attitude-level approach acknowledges individual differences in whether various attributes or products are considered moral. To illustrate this point more clearly, we turn to research by Luttrell et al (2021) that exemplifies this approach. In this work, consumers reported their attitudes toward various product categories (e.g., organic food, electric cars, and made-in-America clothing) as well as the degree to which their positivity toward these product categories was based on their core moral convictions.…”

“…An attitude-level approach recognizes that virtually any attitude can be moralized to varying degrees. That is, although many individuals do moralize normatively moral issues like torture (Aramovich et al, 2012) or recycling (Luttrell et al, 2019), they might not moralize attributes that would be assumed ethical by a variety of other people, such as fair-trade labor and environmental issues (Luttrell et al, 2021; see also, Gilbert, 2006). Other less "normatively moral" products (e.g., one's refrigerator) can also become moralized (Jarudi et al, 2008).…”