Consumer Ethics and Moral Decision-Making
Summary
Consumer ethics and moral decision-making explore how individuals negotiate personal values, social norms and external pressures when making choices in marketplaces. This field examines both prosocial actions, such as purchasing fair-trade or environmentally responsible goods, and unethical behaviours, including concealment of wrongdoing, deception and fraud. Researchers draw on psychological theories of moral identity, cognitive dissonance and moral disengagement to understand the internal mechanisms that justify or inhibit unethical conduct. Sociological perspectives highlight the role of group norms, cultural values and social identification in shaping consumers’ ethical judgements. In digital and sharing-economy contexts, interactions mediated by technology give rise to novel dilemmas around anonymity, trust and reciprocity. Globalisation and intensifying concerns about sustainability have placed consumer ethics at the heart of public policy and corporate strategy, with implications for marketing regulation, stakeholder engagement and the promotion of ethical literacy among citizens.
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Consumer Ethics and Moral Decision-Making publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in consumer ethics and moral decision-making across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Consumer ethics: Principles and standards governing right and wrong in consumer behaviour.
Moral decision-making: Cognitive and emotional processes by which individuals evaluate and choose between ethically charged options.
Social identification: The extent to which individuals perceive themselves as members of a social group, influencing conformity to group norms.
Moral disengagement: Psychological mechanisms that allow individuals to justify unethical actions without self-sanction.
Ethical ideology: Philosophical orientation (e.g. idealism, relativism) that guides individuals’ moral judgements.
Anticipatory guilt: The expectation of guilt if one anticipates acting against moral or social norms.
References
- “Look me in the eye, customer”: How do face-to-face interactions in peer-to-peer sharing economy services affect customers’ misbehavior concealment intentions?. Journal of Business Research (2024).
- Perceived Income Inequality, Trust, and Consumers’ Ethical Judgments. Journal of Macromarketing (2023).
- Mediating Role of Cultural Values in the Impact of Ethical Ideologies on Chinese Consumers’ Ethical Judgments. Journal of Business Ethics (2024).
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