Antecedents of Consumer Ethical Decision-Making: A Multidimensional Analysis of Emotions, Moral Intensity, Moral Philosophies, Personal Norms, and Intrinsic Religiosity

Abstract

Understanding how consumer ethical decision-making is formed and how ethical judgments and behaviors can be promoted is of growing interest in the marketing research agenda. Notwithstanding, there have been calls for additional research focusing on the development of integrated and more comprehensive theoretical backgrounds to improve models’ explanatory and predictive capability. Thus, this research has two main objectives: first, to test the influence of consumer emotions, moral intensity, moral philosophies, personal norms, and intrinsic religiosity on consumer ethical decision-making process and, second, to assess the relative weight of each independent construct on consumer deliberation processes involving ethical issues. Through a valid sample of 413 respondents and using 3 different ethical scenarios, results show that emotions, moral intensity, and personal norms positively influence consumer ethical decision-making. Furthermore, emotion is the dimension that most influences consumers’ ethical choices and actions, providing empirical evidence of their key role in predicting consumer ethics.