Layperson/media friendly abstract:
Willful ignorance is common whenever ethics are involved, and consumer behavior is no exception. Likewise, it is common for people to baselessly denigrate others when they feel threatened. The current research combines these two tendencies. Although most people are at least fairly ethical, this tendency is not always reflected in their market behavior.
When relevant ethical information is not readily available for a product they are considering, such as if a label does not indicate whether a good was manufactured under fair labor conditions, many consumers choose to avoid knowing the information even if it would not be difficult to obtain it (i.e., by asking a salesperson, looking it up on the Internet, etc.). Ethical issues are difficult to think about and could potentially force people to choose a product they otherwise do not want, and so ethics are tempting to ignore. However, could this willful ignorance have any long-lasting (and unforeseeable) negative consequences for the willfully ignorant consumers?
This research shows that willful ignorance of ethical attributes has real costs both to the willfully ignorant consumer and to the consumers who do act ethically. Three studies showed that consumers who choose to remain willfully ignorant of ethical information in turn denigrate consumers who do consider ethical information from the start. Instead of praising these more ethical individuals for doing the right thing, people judge them negatively on a variety of irrelevant traits such as “fashionable” (i.e., ethical consumers are judged to be less fashionable) and “boring” (ethical consumers are considered more boring)—despite the fact that there is no substantive evidence for these negative judgments. Willfully ignorant consumers put ethical consumers down because of threat they feel for not having done the right thing themselves. We know that the denigration results from feelings of ethical threat because the studies support that it does not occur for judgments of people who remain ignorant of non-ethical attributes (such as average manufacturer delivery time) or when it is easy to justify not looking at the ethical information (e.g., due to time constraints). Also, most tellingly, when willfully ignorant consumers are given a second opportunity to do something ethical (e.g., donate to charities) before judging ethical consumers, they do not resort to denigration because this second opportunity reduces the ethical threat.
“Overall our work indicates that feeling unethical relative to others causes discomfort that is relieved by deciding that ethical people are actually unsavory in some way,” said the authors. Thus, people who remain willfully ignorant about how their products are manufactured, where the materials come from, and/or the environmental implications of the products (i.e., all consumers, at least sometimes) are likely to “put down” anyone who behaves better than they do. Worst of all, though, the authors also find that denigrating more ethical consumers just because they appear more ethical makes us become less reactive to ethical issues and even less likely to behave in an ethical manner in the future. Describing the impact of their work, the authors wrote, “Taken together, the cycle of unethical consumerism uncovered by these studies may help explain why there is a discrepancy between our ethical desires and how we actually behave in the marketplace.”
This work is likely to be interesting to anyone curious about behavioral economics and the inconsistency of decision making and judgment, especially in the areas of ethical consumerism. It is also likely to be interesting to marketers and consumers of goods with environmental and human rights implications who wonder why market behavior does not seem to match stated intentions whenever morality is involved. Firms wanting to use ethical attributes as a selling point might consider making this information readily available to all consumers, for example, by placing this information on the product’s packaging. Doing so not only could attract willfully ignorant consumers who would otherwise ignore this information, but also could prevent ethical consumers who would have sought out this information even if it wasn’t present from being judged harshly by other consumers.
