Why do some Consumers Consume Ethically? A Contingency Framework for Understanding Ethical Decision Making

Although consumers’ generally have positive attitudes towards ethically conscious behaviors, their actions are not unequivocally consistent with attitudes. Consumer research to understand the adoption of ethically conscious behaviors is therefore important. This paper makes a cross-cultural analysis of consumers’ ethical decision making process in the context of environment consciousness (Europe, USA and China). A model of individual ethical decision making is presented and tested empirically. We suggest that the information targeted to convince the consumers to engage in ethically conscious behaviors should appeal three subdivisions of their belief structure; the information part, the concern part, and the self-belief part