Collaborative Consumers Can Be Ethical Consumers: Adapting the Defining Issues Test to Understand Ethical Reasoning in Collaborative Consumption Markets
研究改编定义问题测试，评估消费者在协作消费（如节约食物、购买二手服装）中理解道德论证的能力，发现消费者在不同情境下重视不同的道德理由，并能考虑提供者的视角。
Collaborative consumption activities like saving food and buying used clothes are an important and rapidly growing part of sustainable consumer behavior. Many political and commercial campaigns promote collaborative consumption practices by highlighting subsets of normative motives, such as sustainable, social, and ecological effects. Whether or not consumers can comprehend these claims and incorporate them into their decision-making process is, however, unclear. This article introduces a new experimental study design to ethical consumer research—an adapted version of the Defining Issues Test—that enables to assess consumers’ ability to cognitively and intuitively understand moral arguments in collaborative consumption contexts. The experiment was conducted with N = 435 collaborative consumers from Germany. The findings indicate that in different collaborative consumption contexts, consumers consider different moral arguments as important. Furthermore, the findings also indicate that consumers can incorporate the provider’s point of view in their moral judgment.