Emotion Experience in Ethical Consumption: An Exploratory Study in a Tourism Context

The literature on consumer ethics and ethical consumption has experienced immense growth in the past thirty years leading to an array of decision-making models and frameworks (e.g. Rest, 1979, Hunt and Vitell, 1986, Ferrell and Gresham, 1985 and Marks and Mayo, 1991). Nonetheless, Carrigan and Attalla’s (2001) ‘attitude-behaviour gap’ clearly illustrates an inconsistency between consumers actual ethical behaviour and their expressed ethical concerns. This gap has been recognised as one of the key difficulties in these models. One factor that might explain such difficulties is the way in which consumer are constructed as rational, complex decision makers thus overlooking non-rational factors such as emotion. Although, Gaudine and Thorne (2001), and many others have argued that ethical decision-making is an emotionally charged process. Thus far, affect is regarded as an undifferentiated aspect of attitude formation. Failing to recognise the important role of emotion in ethical decision making, this paper seeks to explore how emotions can influence such behaviour.