Research Insights: How we feel about what we buy

Whether we are aware of it or not, our moral values play a role in our decisions as consumers.  For instance, we may consider whether the eggs we have for breakfast come from free-range chickens, or if our coffee is fair-trade. Researchers have long considered the role of morality in consumer psychology but often have neither recognized the range of values that consumers hold nor provided proper context for why different moral considerations emerge.

Guilherme Ramos, assistant professor in the department of MIS, marketing, and analytics, with three co-authors, explores this topic in an article, “When consumer decisions are moral decisions: Moral Foundations Theory and its implications for consumer psychology,” published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology. They employ Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) as a conceptual framework for understanding the diversity of moral thought that exists across cultures and demographic groups. 

MFT describes morality not as a monolithic entity, but as a pluralistic set of intuitive values that were shaped by evolutionary pressures and edited by distinct cultures. Ramos and his co-authors review the central claims of MFT, focused on six twinned moral foundations: care/harm, equality/inequality, proportionality/disproportionality, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and purity/degradation. With a host of examples, the authors show how these moral foundations guide consumer behavior.

There are numerous implications for the study of MFT to analyzing and predicting consumer behavior.  As Ramos and his collaborators state, practitioners “can better predict how consumers will intuitively respond to a wide range of products, services, and advertisements.” Marketers can fashion messages to show how a product or service promotes the moral principles of care, equality, proportionality, loyalty, authority, or purity.

View paper in the Journal of Consumer Psychology (2024), When consumer decisions are moral decisions: Moral Foundations Theory and its implications for consumer psychology.