All Hands on Deck Special Session: Motivating or De-motivating Responsible Consumption? The Divergent Influences of Moral Emotions: An Abstract

Abstract

Human activities are undeniably the cause of the abnormal climate change that has occurred in recent decades. Many of our daily habits cause serious harm to the environment (e.g., overuse of disposable products). Even though consumers understand that such a lifestyle is essentially in violation of our societal standards, very few will take the actions to correct it. We speculate that consumer decisions to correct their existing life habits depend on the emotions they experience in relation to an irresponsible lifestyle. Psychology research suggests that when people commit wrongdoing (i.e., behaviors that are in violation of moral or societal standards), they will feel guilty. There is a high tendency for a guilt-laden person to make amends and correct the wrongdoing. Therefore, guilt is commonly referred to as a moral emotion. Interestingly, another moral emotion, shame, coexists with guilt in most situations but can lead to divergent behavioral consequences by making the person more inclined to escape from the problem. We speculate that the divergence is rooted in a critical difference between the experience of guilt and shame. Guilt involves a negative evaluation of a specific behavior (i.e., “What I did is not environmentally friendly”), while shame tends to result from a negative evaluation of the global self (i.e., “I’m such a non-environmentally friendly person”). Therefore, shame has negative implications about the self. If this is the case, we predict that in situations where shame predominates, consumers will perceive it to be more difficult to improve the problem as it involves changing a defective self. As a result, consumers are less likely to correct their existing lifestyle. In our experiment, we induced feelings of guilt and shame by using bogus feedback about the environmental impact of one’s existing lifestyle (e.g., very high resource demand). The results show that a negative self-evaluation associated with shame leads to a lower intention to correct one’s existing lifestyle. The effect is mediated by the perceived difficulty in improving the problem.