Responses to Ethical Scenarios: The Impact of Trade-Off Salience on Competing Construal Level Effects

Journal of Business Ethics 183 (3):1-18 (2021)
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Abstract

This research investigates the importance of trade-off salience in understanding how variations in consumers’ construal levels can influence moral judgments. Across five experiments, trade-offs are implied and explicitly made salient, and construal levels are manipulated by altering temporal distance and perceptual fluency, and by using a well-established cognitive method. Consistent with prior research, we demonstrate that higher construal levels can reduce anticipated unethical behavior, when trade-offs are not salient, by making higher-level moral values more prominent. When trade-offs are salient, however, we reveal that unethical behavior is increased when construal levels are elevated by making desirability-related thoughts relatively more prominent, compared to feasibility-related thoughts. Tests of mediation provide support for the role of desirability- and feasibility-related thoughts. Together, our results provide insight into the opposing predictions made by construal level theory for ethical decision making by revealing how trade-off salience, often inherent in ethical dilemmas, systematically influences the effects of construal level on ethical decision making.

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References found in this work

Construal-level theory of psychological distance.Yaacov Trope & Nira Liberman - 2010 - Psychological Review 117 (2):440-463.
Moral heuristics.Cass R. Sunstein - 2005 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28 (4):531-542.
Business codes of multinational firms: What do they say?Muel Kaptein - 2004 - Journal of Business Ethics 50 (1):13-31.

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