Sweatshop Labor is Wrong Unless the Jeans are Cute: Motivated Moral Disengagement

Executive Summary:

Most consumers in America have purchased products made with sweatshop labor at one point or another. However, very little attention has been focused on the psychological mechanisms that enable consumers to propagate a system that implicates harm. Although many people say they care about ethical issues such as humane labor conditions, demand for products that guarantee it remains low. According to some estimates, there are hundreds of thousands of sweatshops still operating today. HBS doctoral student Neeru Paharia and professor Rohit Deshpandé examine whether people may be motivated to morally disengage in the presence of harmful attributes such as sweatshop labor when desire for a product is high. They found that research participants were significantly more likely to agree with statements such as: "The use of sweatshop labor is okay because companies must remain competitive," and "Sweatshops are the only realistic source of income for workers in poorer countries," when confronted with a hypothetical pair of shoes with a higher appeal, versus shoes with a lower appeal. The researchers also found that moral disengagement can drive people to like products they believe to be made with sweatshop labor even more. The authors suggest that since we are confronted with conflicts between our desires and our moral standards on nearly a daily basis, this research calls into question the foundation from which our moral judgments rest on. If our moral judgments are likely to vary based on our affective desires, any moral standards we may hold ourselves to are dubious at best. Key concepts include:

• Two studies demonstrate that levels of moral disengagement can be motivated by one's level of desire for a product made with sweatshop labor.
• While past work has studied moral disengagement in the context of war, this work demonstrates how moral disengagement can be used to deal with dissonance that arises from everyday consumption.
• Since we are confronted with conflicts between our desires and our moral standards on nearly a daily basis, we must carefully consider how our desires drive us to justify harmful behavior.
• If people were not able to reduce this dissonance, they might actually demand that their products be produced free of harm.