Browsing by Subject "Morality"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Gaming - The Logic of Corruption
    (2020-12) Velasco Lopez, Miguel
    Corruption is pervasive in all societies and in all walks of life. Governments, public and private companies, sports, education, religious and charitable organizations: none are untouched by corruption, which seems to be both timeless and universal. We propose that gaming, an unethical behavior on which individual agents can become dependent without being aware of it, is at the heart of corruption. Gaming can become pervasive, and upon discovery forces organizations to either stop the gaming or to engage in deception to cover it up and keep profiting from it, many choosing the latter. We present two cognitive mechanisms for this study of corruption based on gaming that allows us to explain the appearance of gaming in organizations and why it may not be stopped once it is detected, sustaining corruption. We illustrate our framework with an experimental design.
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    Impact of Consumers’ Political Ideology on their Evaluation and Response to Brand Transgressions
    (2024-06) Anand, Mayank
    More so than ever before, brands must wade into troubled political waters to meet their stakeholders’ expectations. However, many such initiatives have received significant consumer backlash in recent years. Hence, marketers, more so than ever, need a deeper understanding than just who, liberals or conservatives, are more likely to be offended by the brand’s actions. In this dissertation, I investigate key differences in motivations that liberals and conservatives have in how they express their frustrations with the transgressing brand, and also what sort of brand actions might trigger such frustrations. In my first essay (chapter 2), I focus on harmful transgressions, particularly moral transgressions committed by brands. I report five studies, including one large-scale dataset, that show that conservative consumers (compared with liberal consumers) are more punishment-focused than education-focused in their response to moral brand transgressions. I demonstrate that this difference in response to transgressions is driven by their beliefs about how transgressions should be disciplined (based on Moral Politics Theory). In my second essay (chapter 3), I focus on benign transgressions and demonstrate, through five studies including a large-scale field experiment and an analysis of consumer tweets, that conservative consumers appreciate and produce aggressive humor (humor that denigrates other individuals or societal groups) more than liberals. I also find that this greater appreciation and production of aggressive humor is driven by conservatives' higher belief in social hierarchies, particularly ones that they dominate (social dominance orientation). I discuss theoretical and managerial implications of my research, including guidelines for marketers on how to engage with morally dissatisfied consumers, and how to avoid triggering such transgressions in the first place.
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    We're Good People: Moral conviction as social identity
    (2018-07) Ekstrom, Pierce
    Moral convictions—attitudes that people report are connected to their beliefs about right and wrong—are known to have unique effects on behavior, from activism to intolerance. Less is known, though, about why moral conviction has these effects. I propose that the unique predictive force of moral conviction is partly attributable to the fact that attitudes that people construe as “moral” are social identities closely tied to the self-concept. First, consistent with the idea that moral convictions are tied to the self-concept, I find in two studies that intensity of moral conviction predicts (1) self-reported identity centrality and (2) reaction time to attitude-related stimuli in a me/not me task, even when controlling for reported attitude importance. Further, moral conviction also predicted participants’ scores on a dominant common factor that underlay both outcomes, suggesting that the association between moral conviction and the self-concept is not a mere artifact of method-related factors. Second, and consistent with the idea that moral convictions are social identities, I find evidence that participants used their moral convictions to perceive, categorize, and remember information about other individuals’ positions on political issues, and that they did so more strongly when their convictions were more identity-central. Finally, I find that the association between moral conviction and intolerance is partly accounted for by moral convictions’ centrality to individuals’ identities, suggesting that the conflict that results from moral disagreement may resemble that which accompanies other identities (e.g., race, gender) and therefore might be mitigated with existing prejudice-reduction strategies.
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    Why Disagreement Obstructs Constructive Dialogue: The Role of Biased Attribution of Moral Motives
    (2014-09) Reifen Tagar, Michal
    Diversity of opinions is often celebrated as an opportunity to learn from one another and to improve decision-making by widening the scope of considerations informing decisions, and, on the societal level, is lauded as the foundation of liberal democracy. Yet, constructive dialogue across lines of disagreement is often lacking, especially around the more charged and contentious issues of disagreement. The goal of the current research project was to examine the proposition that biased attribution of moral motives plays an adverse role in the relation between disagreement and tolerance of ideational opponents. In particular, it was expected that people impugn the moral motives of those with dissimilar opinions, especially when the issue of contention is held as a moral conviction, and that this biased perception in turn leads to greater intolerance of such opponents. The pattern of results accrued across four studies supports this expectation. Across diverse issues of disagreement, to the extent that participants held their positions with high moral conviction, they were more likely to see their ideational opponents as less morally motivated than themselves, and this biased attribution, in turn, led to more negative attitudes and emotions toward the other, to greater distrust and desire for social distance, and less willingness to work together; all this occurring above and beyond the simultaneous mediating role of biased attribution of ability. These negative outcomes effectively obstruct the likelihood of engagement and constructive dialogue that could advance shared understanding, and ultimately individual and societal progress and well-being. As such, the pattern of results that emerged from the current research suggests that biased attribution of moral motives in the context of moral disagreement deserves greater attention in future studies of interpersonal, organizational, and intergroup relations, as well as democratic processes.