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Consequences Of Moral Transgressions: How Regulatory Focus Orientation Motivates Or Hinders Moral Decoupling, Kirsten Cowan, Atefeh Yazdanparast

School of Business

How can firms mitigate the impact of moral violations on consumer evaluations? This question has pervaded the business ethics literature. Though prior research has identified decoupling as a moral reasoning strategy where consumers separate moral judgments from evaluations (avoiding moral compromise and dissonance), it is unclear what motivates individuals to decouple. It is the objective of this research to explore regulatory focus theory (i.e., a framework examining consumer mindsets as prevention or promotion orientated) as a motivating factor for moral decoupling. Three experiments are undertaken. Study one demonstrates that with a prevention mindset (e.g., analytical thinking) as opposed to promotion …