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When Are We More Ethical? A Review and Categorization of the Factors Influencing Dual-Process Ethical Decision-Making

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Abstract

The study of ethical decision-making has made significant advances, particularly with regard to the ways in which different types of processing are implicated. In recent decades, much of this advancement has been driven by the influence of dual-process theories of cognition. Unfortunately, the wealth of findings in this context can be confusing for management scholars and practitioners who desire to know how best to encourage ethical behavior. While some studies suggest that deliberate reflection leads to more ethical behavior, other studies find, in contrast, that intuitive decision-making leads to more ethical results. The goal of this integrative conceptual review is to help make sense of such apparently contradictory findings by identifying the moderating influences that lead to more versus less ethical decisions, whether they are made via intuitive or deliberative processes. Based on our integrative review of moderators from different disciplines and eras, we develop a taxonomy that can aid researchers in the task of identifying when similar constructs have been studied under different names. We organize our findings concerning these influences in accordance with four emergent moderator categories—psychological, situational, social, and physiological. This work helps us identify patterns of moderating factors across both intuitive and deliberative ethical decision-making, gaps that suggest future research directions and practical implications.

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Notes

  1. While questions regarding contested issues in ethics remain crucial to the creation and maintenance of healthy societies, we believe that it is similarly essential to understand why unethical behavior persists even when the ethics of a situation are clear. We propose that scandals such as emissions issues at Volkswagen (Hotten 2015) or fraudulent account issues at Wells Fargo (Wattles et al. 2018) did not occur because the ethics of these situations were unclear but rather because such ethics were ignored. As a work of behavioral rather than normative ethics, these latter questions are the focus of this study.

  2. We assign the social consensus aspect of moral intensity to our social moderator category and describe its impact in the associated section of this review.

  3. We included this study because ego depletion was specifically tied to dual-process theory by suggesting that depleted individuals would not have the mental resources to engage in System 2 processing.

  4. Note that we generally categorized samples in studies using Amazon Mechanical Turk as U.S. samples when the relevant rewards were paid in U.S. dollars. In reality, these participants could have been located anywhere, and we have little insight regarding the steps that researchers may have taken to restrict their studies to participants in any particular country. A total of 21 such studies were included in the group of 107 studies that were attributed to the U.S.

  5. The European countries in our review studies were all located in Western Europe and specifically included Germany (12), The Netherlands (11), Sweden (2), The UK (2), Italy(1) and Norway(1), listed in order of frequency.

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Acknowledgements

Support through the ANR Labex IAST is gratefully acknowledged. The authors would like to thank Laurie Barclay, Rellie Derfler-Rozin, Mario Gollwitzer, Gijs van Houwelingen, Caroline Manville, Sean Martin and Kristin Smith-Crowe for reviews of earlier drafts of the manuscript. We are also grateful to the three anonymous reviewers who provided valuable feedback on our manuscript.

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  1. Questrom School of Business, Boston University, 595 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, MA, 02215, USA

    Clark H. Warner

  2. TSM Research, Université Toulouse 1 Capitole, 2 rue du doyen Gabriel Marty, 31042, Toulouse, Cedex 9, France

    Marion Fortin

  3. Emlyon Busiess School, 23 avenue Guy do Collongue, 69130, Ecully, France

    Tessa Melkonian

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  1. Clark H. Warner
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Appendix A: Search Criteria

Clarivate: Web of Science Search String

You searched for: ((TS = (("Automatic Processing" OR "System 1" OR "Controlled Processing" OR "Dual Cognition" OR "Intuition" OR Dual-System OR "Deliberate Processing" OR Heuristic OR "Conation" OR "Hot Cognition" OR "Cold Cognition" OR EGO-Depletion OR "Cognitive Load") AND (Ethic OR "Moral Behavior" OR Stealing OR Cheating OR Lying OR Justice OR "Cooperation" OR "Selfish Behavior" OR Deviance OR Altruistic OR "Moral Reasoning" OR Honesty OR "Ethical Behavior "OR "Ethical Decision-Making" OR "Unethical Decision-Making" OR Pro-Social OR Prosocial OR Justice OR "Fairness" OR "Ethical" OR Moral)) AND WC = (PSYCHOLOGY DEVELOPMENTAL OR COMPUTER SCIENCE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE OR ETHICS OR PSYCHOLOGY MULTIDISCIPLINARY OR PSYCHOLOGY OR MATHEMATICS INTERDISCIPLINARY APPLICATIONS OR SOCIAL SCIENCES INTERDISCIPLINARY OR PSYCHOLOGY BIOLOGICAL OR MULTIDISCIPLINARY SCIENCES OR SOCIAL ISSUES OR PSYCHOLOGY SOCIAL OR MEDICAL ETHICS OR PSYCHOLOGY EXPERIMENTAL OR MANAGEMENT OR INFORMATION SCIENCE LIBRARY SCIENCE OR OPERATIONS RESEARCH MANAGEMENT SCIENCE OR COMPUTER SCIENCE INTERDISCIPLINARY APPLICATIONS OR BUSINESS OR BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES OR ECONOMICS OR SOCIAL SCIENCES MATHEMATICAL METHODS OR SOCIOLOGY OR EDUCATION EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH OR CRIMINOLOGY PENOLOGY OR PHILOSOPHY OR PSYCHOLOGY CLINICAL OR SOCIAL SCIENCES BIOMEDICAL OR PSYCHIATRY OR PSYCHOLOGY APPLIED))) AND LANGUAGE: (English) AND DOCUMENT TYPES: (Article OR Book Chapter OR Data Paper OR Early Access OR Meeting Abstract OR Proceedings Paper OR Review).

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Warner, C.H., Fortin, M. & Melkonian, T. When Are We More Ethical? A Review and Categorization of the Factors Influencing Dual-Process Ethical Decision-Making. J Bus Ethics 189, 843–882 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-022-05281-0

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