Why do people morally evaluate the same economic behavior differently depending on the story surrounding it?
I have a confession to make. I am a marketer.
I’ve spent a good chunk of my adult life helping people decide what they should pay attention to, what they should remember, what they should want, and occasionally, what they absolutely cannot live without even though they were doing perfectly fine five minutes ago.
That makes consumer psychology a particularly strange place to live. You get to watch people make decisions, but you also get to see the stories they tell themselves about why they made those decisions. It’s almost a sneak peek into the potentially evil planning of manipulated public opinion, except that most of the time it’s considerably less sinister and involves a lot more arguing about fonts.
One thing I’ve noticed is that we are not nearly as consistent about morality as we like to think.
Labor
We generally agree that paying people less money is good for the organization paying them. It lowers costs, and lower costs can mean lower prices, higher profits, greater competitiveness, or more money available for other things. But whether we consider that arrangement “good” or “bad” seems to depend heavily on the story surrounding it.
Consider China.
China became the world’s manufacturing powerhouse in part through its enormous labor force, highly developed supply chains, massive manufacturing investment and ability to produce goods at prices that changed the economics of consumer products around the world. The result is a system capable of producing an extraordinary amount of stuff at extraordinarily competitive prices.
And consumers love cheap stuff.
We complain about working conditions, wages and labor practices while simultaneously expecting our phones, clothing, electronics, toys and countless other products to remain inexpensive. The same consumer who might criticize a company for paying workers too little may also become annoyed when that company’s prices increase because it decided to pay workers more.
That’s not necessarily hypocrisy. There are legitimate arguments on both sides. Cheap manufacturing can make products accessible to more people, while low wages and poor working conditions can create very real ethical concerns. The point isn’t to settle that argument here.
The interesting part is the contradiction we create as consumers. We want workers to be paid well, products to be cheap, companies to remain profitable, economies to create jobs and businesses to behave ethically. Somehow, we expect all of those things to happen simultaneously.
Then we encounter a nonprofit, and suddenly the vocabulary changes.
People donate their time. They volunteer. They sacrifice. They give back. They serve their community. They feel good about showing up to “work” every day.
We don’t normally look at a volunteer organization and say, “Interesting. They’ve discovered a clever way to reduce their labor costs to zero.”
Yet, economically speaking, that is one thing volunteer labor does.
The difference is the story.
The volunteer isn’t usually described as an unpaid employee. They’re described as a person doing something meaningful. That distinction matters because human beings are extremely sensitive to motive. We don’t just ask what someone did. We ask why they did it.
Psychologist Fritz Heider’s attribution theory helped establish the idea that people naturally try to explain behavior by attributing it to causes, including a person’s intentions and the circumstances surrounding them. Later attribution research demonstrated just how readily we make assumptions about people’s motives, sometimes placing too much weight on personality and intention and too little on circumstances.
So consider two people performing essentially the same economic function: providing labor without receiving conventional wages.
One is working for a corporation because they need money. The other is volunteering for a nonprofit because they believe in the mission.
We don’t process those situations as equivalent. One person is working, while the other is helping. One is an employee, while the other is a volunteer. One is generating value for a company, while the other is generating value for a cause.
The labor itself hasn’t suddenly become a different chemical substance.
The meaning surrounding it has changed.
Enter the Halo
This is where the halo effect becomes useful.
Once we have a positive impression of an organization, that impression can spill over into our judgments about other things it does. A company associated with greed may have its actions interpreted through suspicion. An organization associated with helping people may receive the benefit of the doubt.
The behavior hasn’t necessarily changed. Our interpretation of the behavior has.
Goodwill provides an interesting real-world example because it demonstrates how complicated this becomes when good intentions collide with economic reality.
Goodwill-affiliated organizations have used a provision of federal law known as Section 14(c), which allows qualifying employers to pay certain workers with disabilities below the standard federal minimum wage under specific circumstances. The practice has generated substantial criticism and public controversy, including criticism directed at Goodwill organizations for the wages paid to some workers with disabilities.
That controversy is useful for our purposes precisely because it isn’t simple.
You can construct an argument that says the system provides employment opportunities to people who might otherwise have difficulty finding work. You can construct another argument that says paying someone less because of a disability is fundamentally unfair.
Both arguments contain an ethical question.
But notice what happens psychologically when we change the label.
“Corporation pays workers below minimum wage.”
That produces one reaction.
“Nonprofit provides employment opportunities for people with disabilities.”
That produces another.
The underlying situation may contain considerably more complexity than either sentence suggests, but the frame has already begun doing its work.
This isn’t an argument that the two situations are morally equivalent. They may not be. The point is that our moral judgment can begin before we’ve finished examining the facts.
And marketers understand framing extraordinarily well.
That’s Our Job
We choose which benefits appear first. We decide what gets emphasized. We decide whether something is called “discounted” or “affordable,” whether a person is a “customer” or a “member,” whether someone is “buying” or “investing,” and whether labor is described as a “cost” or a “contribution.”
The words don’t necessarily change the underlying transaction.
They change the mental model surrounding it.
This is where psychologist Robert Cialdini’s work on persuasion becomes particularly relevant. Principles such as authority, liking, social proof and reciprocity help explain why people don’t evaluate information in a vacuum. Who is delivering the message and what we already think about that person or organization can influence how we receive the message.
And that creates a fascinating problem for consumers. We like to imagine that we evaluate behavior first and then form our opinion. A lot of the time, we may actually form an opinion about the person or organization first and then interpret the behavior through that opinion.
That’s the Good Guy Pass.
Once an organization has established itself as the good guy, some behaviors receive a different psychological interpretation. The corporation isn’t paying low wages; it’s “keeping prices affordable.” The nonprofit isn’t reducing labor costs; it’s “mobilizing volunteers.” The company isn’t selling you something you don’t need; it’s “helping you discover a better solution.”
The underlying action hasn’t necessarily changed. The story has.
And because I am a marketer, this is where things get a little uncomfortable.
We study why people buy things. We study how people respond to words, colors, authority, scarcity, social proof, familiarity and emotion. We study the environment surrounding the decision because the environment is part of the decision.
But this isn’t limited to selling toothpaste, cars or software.
The same psychological machinery can operate around organizations, causes and identities.
We study the tribe. We study what the tribe believes, what it fears, what it admires and what it considers unacceptable. We learn what kinds of language fit comfortably inside that worldview.
The really strange part is that you don’t necessarily have to convince someone that they’re on the right side.
You can simply give them a story in which their side is already the right side.
A corporation can be framed as greedy, and suddenly every cost-cutting decision becomes evidence of greed. A nonprofit can be framed as compassionate, and suddenly a similar cost-cutting decision becomes evidence of sacrifice and efficiency. A worker can be a victim in one story and a hero in another.
Even the exact same behavior can become morally attractive or morally repulsive depending on who appears to be performing it and why we believe they’re doing it.
That’s why I don’t think the most interesting question is whether corporations are evil or nonprofits are saints. That’s too easy.
The interesting question is whether we are applying the same moral measuring stick to both.
If a corporation uses low-cost labor to reduce prices, we might ask whether the workers are being exploited. If a nonprofit uses volunteers to reduce labor costs, we might ask how many wonderful people are donating their time.
Perhaps both questions are appropriate.
Perhaps neither tells the entire story.
The real question is whether we’re judging the behavior, or whether we’re judging the character of the organization performing the behavior.
And there is an even stranger possibility… Maybe we’re judging the story.
Human beings seem to have an extraordinary appetite for assigning characters to complicated systems. We want heroes and villains. We want victims and villains. We want entrepreneurs and greedy corporations, charitable organizations and exploitative organizations, people who are helping and people who are taking.
Reality is usually considerably messier… The corporation may be trying to keep prices low while remaining profitable. The nonprofit may be trying to stretch limited resources as far as possible. The worker may be perfectly happy with the arrangement, unhappy with it, or somewhere in the middle. The consumer may benefit from one arrangement while morally objecting to it at the same time.
None of those things fit particularly well into a good-guy/bad-guy story. But stories are easier to process than complexity. And that is exactly why they are so powerful.
The Good Guy Pass isn’t necessarily a deliberate conspiracy. It doesn’t require an evil executive rubbing their hands together in a dark conference room while whispering, “Excellent. They will never suspect the volunteers.”
Sometimes nobody is manipulating anybody. Sometimes people genuinely believe the story they’re telling and That’s what makes it powerful.
The most effective persuasion doesn’t always tell you what to think. It gives you a framework that makes certain conclusions feel obvious.
And once you’ve decided who the good guys are, you may start interpreting everything they do through that lens. Maybe that’s one of the stranger responsibilities of marketing.
We don’t just sell products. We help construct some of the little stories people use to make sense of those products, the companies behind them and, occasionally, themselves.
So perhaps the next time you find yourself completely certain that one organization is obviously good and another is obviously terrible, stop for a moment and look at the behavior underneath the labels.
- Take away the logo.
- Take away the mission statement.
- Take away the heroic photograph.
- Take away the villainous headline.
Then ask yourself:
Would I judge this behavior the same way if somebody else were doing it?
If the answer is no, you may have just discovered the Good Guy Pass.
And somewhere, a marketer is probably taking notes. Don’t worry. We’re not manipulating you… We’re just studying why you’re so easy to manipulate.