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Contesting Dishonesty: When and Why Perspective-Taking Decreases Ethical Tolerance of Marketplace Deception

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Abstract

Deception is common in the marketplace where individuals pursue self-interests from their perspectives. Extant research suggests that perspective-taking, a cognitive process of putting oneself in other’s situation, increases consumers’ ethical tolerance for marketers’ deceptive behaviors. By contrast, the current research demonstrates that consumers (as observers) who take the dishonest marketers’ perspective (vs. not) become less tolerant of deception when consumers’ moral self-awareness is high. This effect is driven by moral self-other differentiation as consumers contemplate deception from the marketers’ perspective: high awareness of the “moral self” motivates consumers to distance themselves from the “immoral other.” The findings shed new light on how self-morality can vicariously shape social consideration in ethical judgments.

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Notes

  1. In this article, “marketer” is used as a broad term referring to “a person or company that advertises or promotes something” (Lexico 2020), including a seller, a salesperson, or a sales agent. Thus, these terms will be used interchangeably throughout the manuscript.

  2. The compensation amounts and median durations of all studies are available in Web Appendix W4.

  3. Twenty-one participants did not follow the priming or neutral instructions by typing three sentences as instructed. Responses from those participants who followed the instructions (n = 139; 50 females, Mage = 36.9) were used for data analysis.

  4. The original perspective-taking trait scale has seven items. In this study, participants rated all seven items. One item, “If I'm sure I'm right about something, I don't waste much time listening to other people's argument,” did not fit well with our research context, and it was inconsistent with the other six items and would significantly reduce the scale reliability to 0.53. Thus, it was excluded from the analysis.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments. The authors would also like to thank Peter Darke, Kent Grayson, Ann Kronrod, Namika Sagara, and Lan Xia for their helpful comments on previous versions of the article. This research project was supported by the Joseph P. Healey Research Grant and Research Educational Service Fund, University of Massachusetts Boston. The three authors equally contributed to this article.

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  1. College of Management, University of Massachusetts Boston, 100 Morrissey Blvd., Boston, MA, 02125, USA

    Guang-Xin Xie

  2. College of Business and Economics, Towson University, Towson, MD, USA

    Hua Chang

  3. Lubar School of Business, University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee, Milwaukee, WI, USA

    Tracy Rank-Christman

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Xie, GX., Chang, H. & Rank-Christman, T. Contesting Dishonesty: When and Why Perspective-Taking Decreases Ethical Tolerance of Marketplace Deception. J Bus Ethics 175, 117–133 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-020-04582-6

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