Responses to ethical scenarios: the impact of trade-off salience on competing construal level effects

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 distanc...

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Bibliographic Details
Authors: Amaral, Nelson Borges (Author) ; Jiao, Jinfeng (Jenny) (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: Springer Science + Business Media B. V 2023
In: Journal of business ethics
Year: 2023, Volume: 183, Issue: 3, Pages: 745-762
Further subjects:B Trade-offs
B Aufsatz in Zeitschrift
B Construal level
B Ethical scenarios
B Moral judgments
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Summary: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.
ISSN:1573-0697
Contains:Enthalten in: Journal of business ethics
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1007/s10551-021-04995-x