Virtuous or Vicious? New Insights Into Moral Processes in the Marketplace

[...]Stuppy and colleagues investigate when consumers judge their behavior towards companies as immoral. [...]Xu and Bolton uncover how consumers form moral judgements about companies that engage in wasteful manufacturing processes. [...]Kim and colleagues examine how consumers form moral judgements about policy makers. Stellar & Wilier, 2018). [...]we expect that while self-control failure will not be thought to imply bad intentions (and thus bad moral character), success will be thought to demonstrate the ability to realize good intentions (and thus signal moral goodness). [...]we predict an asymmetry in inferences of moral character from personal selfcontrol, such that successes are regarded as more morally diagnostic than failures. Importantly, self-control success also decreased the selection of warm traits relative to failure (F(1,199) = 32.90, p < .001), ruling out halo effects and indicating that this inferential asymmetry is specific to moral character.