The Moral Compass of Identity: Ethical Predispositions Predict the Importance Consumers Ascribe to Their Group and Individual Identities

While the consequences of different identities on consumer decision making and behaviors have been extensively studied, it remains unexplored what makes consumers differ on the importance they place on the various identities they hold. The current research partially fills this gap by examining whether ethical predispositions predict the importance consumers ascribe to their group-based and individual identities. Across five studies, we demonstrate that formalism (i.e., making right-wrong judgments based on compliance with a set of moral rules/principles) is associated with greater importance of group-identity affiliations, and conversely, utilitarianism (i.e., assessing an action’s rightness based on its outcomes in terms of well-being maximization or harm minimization) is associated with greater centrality of individual-identity attributes. Finally, we establish that these associations of formalism and utilitarianism with group and individual identities are practically meaningful by showing how they play out in consumer contexts such as charitable giving and advertising responses.