(Illustration by Adam McCauley)
Surveys indicate that half of global consumers report they are willing to pay more for products from socially responsible companies. Yet self-reports of ethical behavior in the marketplace do not appear to match reality. Sustainable products in many categories are not market leaders. For example, despite the well-publicized need to protect rain forests, consumers continue to buy furniture and other items made from rain-forest wood.
Rebecca Walker Reczek, an associate professor of marketing at Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business, believes that selective memory contributes to this gap between what consumers say they want and their actual choices. “People want to make good ethical decisions; it’s part of how we develop as humans,” Reczek says. “But we don’t. I wanted to understand if it’s for marketplace reasons or our psychology.”
In a series of studies, Reczek and her coauthors explored the interplay of memory and desire in ethical considerations when purchasing products. Their research probed the effect of bias on memory generated by conflict between the “should self” (how we see ourselves ethically) and the “want self” (what we desire) and by the resolution of such conflict. The authors found that people often suffer from “willfully ignorant memory”: They forget or misremember ethically relevant information when it conflicts with their desire to purchase something.
“Prior research has shown that people tend to have poorer memory of unethical actions that they had engaged in previously,” says Angela Lee, the Mechthild Esser Nemmers Professor of Marketing at Northwestern’s Kellogg School. “What is interesting about this paper is that forgetting happens to unethical information people encountered, rather than unethical behaviors they had performed.”
Reczek understood that providing ethical attribute information to consumers is not enough to ensure that they use the information, because memory has ways of muting or twisting messages that are uncomfortable and threaten their sense of self. Although some people cope by simply avoiding questions about ethical attributes when shopping, participants in Reczek’s study didn’t have that option: They were explicitly informed of the products’ ethical attributes.
In one experiment, university students were given descriptions of six hypothetical brands of desks that differed in wood source, quality, and price. The ethical attribute pertained to whether the wood was from endangered rain forests or sustainable tree farms. Asked to memorize and then recall the descriptions, participants were roughly five times more likely to misremember details about the rain-forest wood as the farm wood. Further tests ruled out explanations other than willfully ignorant memory.
Reczek also sought to determine how much willfully ignorant memory is driven by the want/should conflict, and whether willfully ignorant memory affects not only recall but also recognition. In this experiment, two groups of participants were asked to create an outfit online from a selection of various T-shirts, jackets, jeans, and shoes, with only some participants instructed to place the items in a labeled shopping cart to indicate purchase. The jeans choices had an ethical dimension: They were described as made by adults or by adults and children.
Participants in both groups showed a greater propensity to incorrectly recognize ethical information when the jeans were made with child labor. This confirmed the authors’ hypothesis that when consumers face want/should conflicts regarding ethical attributes, the default response is to allow the want self to prevail—by misremembering the relevant attribute. While such willful forgetting may make people feel better about certain outcomes, “the failure to retrieve questionable ethics-related information from memory may lead to suboptimal decision making,” Lee says.
A third study investigated how consumers would react when the product’s ethical attribute was relatively less pressing. Participants were reminded of the many other ethical issues facing humanity, including some, such as genocide, that are arguably more distressing than child labor. That group remembered that child labor was involved significantly more than others. “The pressure of the should self can be reduced when consumers perceive the ethical issue at hand as having relatively less ethical weight,” Reczek says. “When this reduction occurs, consumers experience less want/should conflict and are more likely to remember ethical information.”
The implications of Reczek’s research are challenging for consumers and social activists alike. “For consumers, you can’t rely on memory when it comes to voting with your pocketbook,” she says. “You have to take the time to find out about a company’s practices. And companies focused on ethical production have to remind consumers at the point of purchase.”
Rebecca Walker Reczek, Julie R. Irwin, Daniel M. Zane, and Kristine R. Ehrich, “That’s Not How I Remember It: Willfully Ignorant Memory for Ethical Product Attribute Information,” Journal of Consumer Research, vol. 45, 2018, pp. 185-207.
Read more stories by Marilyn Harris.