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Anger Strays, Fear Refrains: The Differential Effect of Negative Emotions on Consumers’ Ethical Judgments

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Abstract

Although various factors have been studied for their influence on consumers’ ethical judgments, the role of incidental emotions has received relatively less attention. Recent research in consumer behavior has focused on studying the effect of specific incidental emotions on various aspects of consumer decision making. This paper investigates the effect of two negative, incidental emotional states of anger and fear on ethical judgment in a consumer context using a passive unethical behavior scenario (i.e., too much change received). The paper presents two experimental studies. Study 1 focuses on the interaction of moral intensity (amount of change) and incidental emotion state in predicting the ethical judgment while study 2 investigates the underlying causal mechanism behind the process, using a mediation analysis. The results reveal a significant interaction between moral intensity and incidental emotion. Specifically, individuals in the state of incidental fear exhibit higher levels of ethical judgment as the moral intensity increases as compared to individuals in the state of incidental anger. Further, perceived control is found to mediate the relationship between emotional state and ethical judgment under higher moral intensity condition.

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Notes

  1. The consumer ethics scale is multidimensional with four distinct factors—actively benefiting from illegal activities, passively benefiting at the expense of others, actively benefiting from deceptive or questionable practices, and no harm/no foul (with an additional dimension of “doing good” added at a later stage).

  2. The attentional activity dimension signifies appraising the relevance or importance of a stimulus in order to determine whether to pay attention or ignore the stimulus. Certainty refers to the level of predictability or unpredictability in a particular situation. Control refers to the perception of whether the current situation or event is under the control of the subject, another person, or an impersonal source. Pleasantness measures the intrinsic pleasantness, or otherwise, of a situation or stimulus. Responsibility refers to the extent to which the subject, another person, or some other impersonal source, is responsible for causing the situation creating the emotion. The dimension of anticipated effort signifies the level of effort needed to deal with a situation.

Abbreviations

CES:

Consumer ethics scale

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. EADA Business School, Arago 204, 08011, Barcelona, Spain

    Jatinder J. Singh

  2. UNSW Australia Business School, University of New South Wales, Sydney, 2052, Australia

    Nitika Garg & Rahul Govind

  3. School of Business, University of Mississippi, Oxford, MS, 38677, USA

    Scott J. Vitell

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  1. Jatinder J. Singh
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  2. Nitika Garg
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  3. Rahul Govind
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  4. Scott J. Vitell
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Correspondence to Scott J. Vitell.

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Singh, J.J., Garg, N., Govind, R. et al. Anger Strays, Fear Refrains: The Differential Effect of Negative Emotions on Consumers’ Ethical Judgments. J Bus Ethics 151, 235–248 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-016-3248-x

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