The Relationship Between Students' Attitudes Toward General Ethical Dilemmas And Their Attitudes Toward Hypothetical Marketing Moral Dilemmas.

• Author: Malinowski, Carl

INTRODUCTION

Philosophy, which includes ethics, is the search for the truth. The philosophy of science, which can be applied to the study of morality, uses the scientific method to seek the truth. The scientific study of morality can use ethical scenarios in a survey format. Ethical scenarios can focus on everyday issues of right and wrong, as well as business moral issues. Perhaps there is an empirical relationship between general ethics attitudes and marketing ethics attitudes. If this is true, then both kinds of scenarios can be part of the ethics training of undergraduate and graduate business students. Teaching both kinds of ethics to accounting, finance, management and marketing students can be a boon to long term business success. This, in turn, can give their employers a global advantage over their multi-national competitors.

General ethics, particularly if the issues are intense, can lead to a wide variety of opinions about the morally correct solution. This may be true of marketing ethics as well. Perhaps a correlation between these two sets of opinions can give us a consensus of how all kinds of ethical dilemmas are resolved. Job candidates and current employees who respond morally to both kinds of scenarios may be more deserving of being hired and promoted, respectively.

The purpose of the present study is to investigate the relationship between students' attitudes to nine hypothetical marketing moral dilemmas and their attitudes to ten general ethics dilemmas.

PURPOSE OF THE STUDY

The present investigation looks at possible correlations between students' attitudes toward general ethical dilemmas and their responses to a set of hypothetical marketing moral dilemmas. The following combination of factors separates this study from prior research in the area of relating ethics measures to each other: (1) the emphasis is on marketing dilemmas rather than on other business issues; (2) all three components of the tri-component model (thought, feeling, behavior tendency) follow each marketing dilemma; (3) general ethics dilemmas serve as a comparison measure; (4) students in different business majors are studied (accounting, finance, tax, management, marketing); (5) both undergraduate and graduate students participate; (6) undergraduate respondents include freshmen, sophomores, juniors and seniors and (7) both the urban and suburban campuses of the cooperating university are included.

PRIOR RESEARCH RELATING MEASURES OF MORALITY TO EACH OTHER

Moral Knowledge and Moral behavior

Hartshorne, May and Shuttleworth (1930) looked for relationships between deception and moral knowledge. For three different populations they obtained correlations between honesty and moral knowledge. Knowing something is wrong was related to a decreased likelihood that it would be done.

Moral judgment and Moral behavior

In their study of male undergraduates Malinowski and Smith (1985) found that participants with low principled morality scores (using Rest's Defining Issues Test) cheated sooner and more often than those with higher moral reasoning scores. thers finding a relationship between moral insight and moral conduct were Dunivant (1976), Harris, Mussen and Rutherford 1976), Kohlberg (1963), Krebs and Rosenwald (1977), Leming (1978), Saltzstein, Diamond and Belenky (1972), Schwartz, Feldman, Brown and Heingartner (1969) and Taylor and Walker (1977, in Santrock, 2005). More recently Chang and Yen (2007) studied Taiwanese executive MBA students. Students "with a high level of moral development exhibited less of a tendency to continue an unprofitable project than those with a lower level of moral development" (p. 347).

Moral judgment and Moral Attitudes

Everett, Thorne and Danehower (1996) found a positive correlation between cognitive moral development and attitudes about female executives. Logsdon, Thompson and Reid (1994) found that the higher one's moral judgment the less likely one is to approve of social piracy. Mason and Mudrack (1971) found a negative correlation between principled moral insight and "agreement that organizational interests legitimately supersede those of the wider society" (p. 1314). Schwepker (1999) found a negative correlation between moral judgment and interest in behaving unethically. Sparks and Merenski (2000) found a positive relationship between moral reasoning and the "ability to cognitively assume the perspective of others" (p. 369). Rogers and Smith (2001) found that moral insight is associated with ethical responses to a scenario in which the company comptroller decides to falsify records.

Moral Emotion and Moral Conduct

Malinowski and Smith (1985) found that cheating was related to anticipatory guilt. More anticipatory guilt was related to less cheating. Others finding a negative relationship between cheating and guilt were Cocking (1969), Grinder and McMichael (1963), MacKinnon (1938), Rebelsky, Allinsmith and Grinder (1963), Smith, Ryan and Diggins (1972) and Unger (1962).

Moral Emotion and Moral Judgment

Kohlberg (1969) said that cognitive and affective aspects of morality are related: "Guilt in its most precise sense is moral self-judgment" (p. 392). Johnson( 1963, in Kohlberg, 1969) obtained a positive relationship between guilt and moral reasoning. Ruma and Mosher (1967) also found a positive association between moral judgment and guilt. Lan, McGowing, McMahon, Reiger and King (2008) obtained correlations between moral reasoning and the Schwartz Personal Values Questionnaire.

HYPOTHESES

Given the relationship between moral knowledge and moral behavior, moral judgment and moral behavior, moral judgment and moral attitudes, moral emotion and moral conduct and moral emotion and moral judgment, the following predictions are justified:

In responding to hypothetical marketing moral dilemmas, students who respond ethically to general ethical dilemmas will: (Hypothesis 1) Believe an ethically questionable marketing action is wrong, (Hypothesis 2) Anticipate guilt if they onsidered making the same ethically questionable marketing decision and (Hypothesis 3) Say they would not make the ethically questionable marketing decision.

METHOD

Subjects

A total of 772 students from a large Eastern multi-campus university participated. A total of 640 were undergraduates, 129 were graduate students and 3 subjects left the question blank. The students were mostly majors in five business school disciplines: accounting, finance, tax, management and marketing. Undergraduate students included freshmen...