Emotion and Ethical Decision Making: an Exploratory Study

Ethics reveals to be a growing area of interest in business literature. Based initially on a cognitive-developmental approach, ethical decision making has progressively been understood as a multidimensional process that requires additional constructs to explain the phenomena of morality, becoming emotions a key element in consumer ethical deliberation. Aiming to examine the role of emotion in consumer’s ethical decision making process, forty-seven (47) in-depth interviews were conducted, using critical incident technique. Findings identify most recurrent unethical behaviours in consumption environment. The results also suggest that concerns expressed with ethics do not necessarily lead to ethical behaviour. In addition, results show that emotion not only influences ethical decision making, but also is a significant outcome of moral decisions.