Abstract

Focusing on millennials, individuals born between 1980 and 2000 and representing the largest generational population in our history, this research seeks to understand their ethical decision-making processes by exploring the distinctive, yet interconnected, theories of personal values and cognitive moral reasoning. Utilizing a decision-making framework introduced in the 1990s, we discover that there is a statistically supported relationship between a millennial’s personal value orientation and stage of cognitive moral reasoning. Moreover, we discover a strong relationship between three of the four value orientations and a corresponding stage of cognitive moral reasoning. The theoretical and practical research implications of our discovery about millennials’ decision making are discussed.