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This paper aims to examine how social and moral salience influences the activation/deactivation of consumer motives and how this in turn affects costly pro-environmental consumer behavior.

In two experiments involving real purchases, it was tested whether social salience (private vs public choice) and moral salience (recall of neutral vs immoral action) lead to the activation of normative motives, and/or the deactivation of economic motives, and whether this facilitated the purchase of a costlier green product.

Participants were motivated by both economic and normative motives, and they actively made trade-offs between these motives as the choice environment changed. Green consumption was positively influenced by social and moral salience but only when both salience conditions were present simultaneously. However, salience did not lead to the activation of normative motives, as was expected, but to a deactivation of the motive to save money. This may suggest that while the importance of norms was not altered by salience, the perceived value of the green option likely changed in such a way that participants became more inclined to choose the costlier green option.

The present research sheds light on how and why social and moral salience influences green consumption. It was demonstrated that social and moral salience influences the tendency to purchase costlier green products, however, only when both are combined. Also, the effects of social and moral salience may not rely on the activation of facilitating social and moral motives but rather on the deactivation of conflicting economic motives.

While morality is ever-present in elections, scholars have yet to merge political public relations and Moral Foundations Theory. It is crucial to assess the complex morality present not only in social deduction, but also in political strategic communication. The current work aims to analyze the issue agendas and their relationships in the 2020 presidential campaign and assesses their moral strategy.

This study used a computer-assisted content analysis (N = 7,888) with each moral intuition coded from the Moral Foundations Dictionary. Datapoints included campaign tweets, Facebook posts, debate performances, remarks, news releases and nomination acceptance speeches. Coverage included articles from including The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, CNN and Fox News to assess both liberal and conservative media.

Candidates' issue and moral agendas were correlated with each other and with the media's agenda. Comparatively, the Biden campaign has stronger correlations when it came to connecting with issues, stakeholders and moral intuitions in the media agenda than the Trump campaign. For issues, the Biden campaign prioritized COVID-19 and the economy, while the Trump campaign prioritized the economy and crime. The candidates also had similar moral strategies.

This study suggests effectively leveraging organizational communications in democracies can support the transfer of object salience, moral attributes and networks to media coverage, public discourse and opponent messaging. It can also help achieve organizational goals by managing public image, reputation and expectations.

This work expands the literature by taking a pluralist moral psychology approach in assessing the salience and correlation of five moral intuitions: harm/care, fairness/reciprocity, ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect and purity/sanctity. This study serves as a springboard for examining morality's impact on political public relations.

This study aims to identify the origins, mechanisms and outcomes of applying behavioral insight in public policy research.

The authors conducted a systematic literature review to answer three research questions. The authors identified 387 primary studies, dated from January 2000 to April 2021 and coded them through a thematic analysis. Related studies were obtained through searching in Emerald, ScienceDirect, Sage, Springer, Wiley and Routledge.

The results identified eight themes for origins, 16 themes for mechanisms/techniques and 13 outcome-related themes. Through the thematic analysis, the major mechanisms of behavioral approach were found to be social marketing, information provision, social norms, incentives, affect, regulation design, framing, salience, defaults, simplification, networking, environment design, scheduled announcements, commitments, attitude-preference-behavior manifestation and combining behavioral and nonbehavioral mechanisms.

The findings of this review help policymakers to design or redesign policy elements.

This review provides the first systematic exploration of the existing literature on behavioral public policy.

The widespread use of communication technologies and social media platforms such as the #ME TOO movement has amplified the importance for business leaders to demonstrate high standards of ethical behavior for career success. Although the concept of ethical leadership has been widely investigated, a theoretical framework from a career perspective does not yet exist.

This study draws from sensemaking theory to argue that career identity salience shapes leaders' communication behavior to influence the extent to which they are perceived to be ethical by subordinates. We test our hypotheses using multisource data with a sample (n = 337) of business managers.

The results show that career identity salience has positive influence on communication competence, which positively influences ethical leadership. We further find that communication frequency positively moderates the relationship between communication competence and ethical leadership.

The theoretical and practical implications that, motivated by their career identity, career-ambitious leaders can manipulate subordinates' perceptions of their ethical behavior are discussed along with suggestions for future research.

To our knowledge, this is the first research to provide a career perspective on ethical leadership.

Even though the definitions of morality may seem to provide straightforward criteria to assess the morality of individuals, moral judgments are challenging and less exact. This paper aims to advance extant work on morality and moral judgment by providing a conceptualization of boundary conditions in the relationship between moral judgments and consumer behavior.

An interdisciplinary literature review is conducted to integrate extant knowledge on morality, moral judgment and consumer behavior to identify and conceptualize boundary conditions affecting moral judgments and decision-making. The research draws on moral foundation theory and norm activation model, and the proposed factors and relationships are grounded in construal level theory and regulatory focus theory.

The research identifies cultural, individual and situational factors that influence moral judgments and decision-making and argues that moral judgments exhibit a similar pattern across types, but cultural factors determine the salience of each moral foundation type. Moreover, construal factors relevant to the situation (i.e. proximity vs distance) affect the extent and manner of moral judgments, and individual mindsets and their associated information processing styles (e.g. money vs time orientation and promotion vs prevention orientation) make moral judgments more malleable, adding a degree of variability to judgments within similar cultures and situations.

The research makes a rather unique contribution to consumer morality literature by identifying and discussing three different groups of factors with the potential to impact individuals’ judgments of, and reactions to, moral foundation violation information.

The purpose of this paper is to critically evaluate Kant’s idea of grounding morality within the limits of practical reason. Kant argues that morality must be devoid of emotions if the authors must make the right decisions. His idea of morality is basically ratiocentric. This paper, therefore, seeks a justification of Kant’s ratiocentricism, which excludes subjective emotional dimensions in moral actions and judgements.

This paper adopts a critical and analytic method of research. It is not empirical research, and hence, does not make use of tables and quantifiable data. The methodology is exclusively qualitative in nature.

The major finding of this research work is that an application of practical reason is necessary for the moral agency but it is not a sufficient condition for moral agency. The existential realities demand a synthetic application of reason and emotion in moral issues. So then, a good will is determined by the rational principle. The reason is an organic whole that is capable of functioning both practically and theoretically. The practical reason is not reasoned functioning to acquire knowledge but reason operating as a guide and as the directing force of the will. The application of pure, practical reason and relevant emotional considerations is both necessary and sufficient for moral agency.

This paper is the outcome of deep critical reflections on Kant’s moral philosophy by the author.

This study aims to explore the determinants of the green purchase behaviour (GPB) of environment-friendly and energy-efficient electronic products market. It specifically examines the moderating effect of consumers’ moral identity on the relationships between the consumption values and GPB of environment-friendly and energy-efficient electronic products market. It also examines the direct relationship between consumption values and GPB.

In this study, the theory of consumption values is combined with the moral identity of consumers. A structured questionnaire mall-intercept survey was used to collect data from 396 respondents, which was subsequently processed using the smart PLS software for partial least square structural equation modelling analysis.

Findings reveal that functional value, social value, conditional value and epistemic value are the significant predictors of GPB of the environment-friendly and energy-efficient electronic products market. The moral identity of consumers also appears to positively moderate the relationships between functional, emotional and conditional values and the GPB.

The energy efficiency of electronic products is included in this study as an additional feature of functional value, while government support and business promotional initiatives are incorporated as the new elements of conditional value. Therefore, the inclusion and evaluation of the moral identity of consumers, alongside new elements of functional and conditional values in the theory of consumption values, could be considered a significant theoretical addition. The study uncovered certain customer insights that could help accelerate the adoption of green electronic products, which may result in better energy savings, reduced carbon emissions and environmental safety.

The purpose of this study is to investigate how a higher status of one stakeholder group relates to the outcomes of stakeholder–organization relationship with other lower status stakeholder groups.

This conceptual paper uses insights from resource dependence theory while applying the tenets of social dominance theory (SDT) to develop a model with testable propositions explaining the variability with regard to stakeholder dominance and the resulting outcome in terms of (un)favorable organizational responsiveness to other stakeholder demands.

Firm’s behavior or decisions regarding a particular stakeholder group may be influenced by dominant hierarchical status of another stakeholder group if the latter considers that their respective interests are misaligned and is not willing to compromise. The argument build in this paper indicates that it is likely that the influence of the dominant stakeholder group will undermine stakeholders from a subordinate group.

This paper contributes to two distinct literature streams. First, this paper extends research on stakeholder responsiveness exploring the triadic relationship, particularly focusing on stakeholders’ perspective that has been given much less attention in prior literature. Second, this paper extends the application of the SDT to a stakeholder relationship context potentially allowing for a more parsimonious theory.

This study aims to examine the influence of ethical ideology (EID) toward the commission of information or measures manipulation (IMM), as it is a less salient ethical issue that has failed to attract the attention of researchers.

Using stratified random sampling strategy, this study used survey questionnaire with 217 usable responses. It adopted a relatively new Ruler-Option (RO) scale. Both SPSS 21 and partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) were used to analyze its data.

Findings revealed surprising results where idealism and IMM was significantly positively related, while relativism and IMM was significantly negatively related, contradicting the generalized theory that relativists demonstrate higher propensity to behave unethically as compared to idealists.

This study only examined a direct relationship between EID and IMM when such relationship might be influenced by other mediating or moderating effects. It also exclusively focused on a single industry, hence limiting a meaningful comparison among multiple industries.

The finding provides a proof that IMM does prevail in a highly regulated banking industry that efforts must be made to curb these practices. Notably, having relativists as decision-makers may give an advantage due to their ability to comprehensively appraise every ethical issue based on the situational context.

Due to its contradictory findings, this study contributed essential insights to the existing body of knowledge by stimulating discussion on EID and unethical behavior. Additionally, it provides evidence for the suitability of RO scale and the PLS-SEM in statistical analysis.

This paper aims to examine how consumer moral identity (MI) affects the impact of cause-related marketing (CRM). CRM is a popular hybrid marketing tool that incorporates charitable initiatives and sales promotion. CRM has strength in simultaneously encouraging consumer purchases and doing something good for the society. Drawing on the moral identity (MI)-based motivation model, this research examines how consumer MI influences consumer behavioural response to CRM.

Two field experiments were conducted to test a series of hypotheses relating to the conditional effect of MI on behavioural response to CRM.

Brand social responsibility image and emotional brand attachment positively moderated the relationship between consumer MI centrality and intention to purchase CRM sponsor brand.

Findings contribute to the literature on CRM, MI-based motivation of consumer behaviour and emotional brand attachment.