The Role of Mindfulness in Driving Ethical Consumption

摘要

Amid recent proliferation of research on consumer ethics, a substantial body of consumer ethics research focuses on consumers' judgements of questionable situations and drivers of those beliefs (e.g. Arli and Pekerti, 2016; Lu and Lu, 2010; Vitell, 2003; Vitell et al., 2016; Vitell et al., 2007). The Ethically Minded Consumer Behavior (EMCB) scale has been recently developed to bridge the attitude—behavior gap and validated in developed market contexts (Sudbury-Riley and Kohlbacher, 2016). Thus, the validation of this ethical consumption scale in developing market settings is warranted, especially in Asia. On the other hand, for consumers to be ethically minded requires some degree of attention and awareness (Carrington et al., 2010). Therefore, the impact of an individual's mindfulness as a mechanism is a possibility. In a more complex, and chaotic world, mindfulness can influence and orient one's thinking toward positive end (Beard, 2014). What is puzzling is that how ethical choice once makes an inroad then turns to be ethical habit. The current theorizing implies that an individual's general ability to control over their thoughts, feelings and behaviors underpins habits and that deliberate consumer choice requires specific regulatory resource (Wood and Neal, 2009). Therefore, specific self-efficacy (self-efficacy for ethical consumption in this research) is a potential intervening mechanism between mindfulness and ethical consumption behavior. The research seeks to address the research question: how does mindfulness influence ethically minded consumer behavior?