Confronting Consumers’ Complicity: Do Confrontations with Causal Responsibility for Sweatshop Labor Raise Moral Obligation?

Abstract

We report an internal reanalysis of five exploratory studies (total N = 1460) and two preregistered experiments (Ns = 778; 528), in which we investigated to what extent perceived causal involvement in harming sweatshop workers increases perceived moral obligation to support the workers. Within hypothetical scenarios as well as alleged magazine articles, target persons purchasing sweatshop-made products were contrasted with uninvolved bystanders. When participants made judgments about abstract others, causal involvement moderately increased ratings of moral obligation. However, when facing their own complicity in maintaining sweatshop conditions, the effect of causal involvement was small to non-existent. The greater sensitivity to the moral imperative of causal responsibility for indirect harm within global supply chains for others than for the self cannot be attributed to defensive processes, however. To the contrary, moral obligation for the self remained comparatively high, even if causal responsibility was low, presumably due to the greater reliance on internal states for the self.

Keywords

• moral judgment
• moral obligation
• confrontation
• causal responsibility
• sweatshops