How Do Unethical Consumers Judge Unethical Consumption?

Social intuitionist theory explains how people morally judge others’ behavior. However, the theory does not consider how people’s own behavior affects these judgments. We extend social intuitionist theory by examining how consumers’ moral judgments of fellow consumers’ morally problematic behavior (MPB) are affected by consumers’ own engagement in the same MPB and their subsequent rationalization thereof via moral disengagement. Across three studies with more than 2,000 consumers—a global survey across 31 countries, and two experiments that replicate and fortify our survey findings, we found that consumers’ negative moral judgments of other consumers’ MPB are biased by their own behavior: Consumers who refrained from engaging in MPB devalued such MPB made by others, whereas people who engaged in the MPB themselves do not devalue such behaviors. We find that this effect can partly be explained by people morally disengaging from their behavior