Does Being Ethical Pay?
I don’t know if this is a follow-up to my post yesterday on moral dilemmas or if it is a new topic, but I was intrigued by an article in yesterday’s WSJ, with the same title as this post. sloanreview.mit.edu/wsj/insight/brand/2008/05/12/
The article did not just treat it as a philosophical question but reported on the results of some experiments conducted at MIT’s Sloan Business school. In the experiments, subjects were shown the same products–t-shirts and coffee. One group was told that the products had been made using high ethical standards; the other group was told the producers had used low ethical standards. Subjects in the groups were willing to reward the ethically produced products by paying higher prices and punished the ones produced by an “unethical” company by paying lower prices.
There are some additional wrinkles to the results, which you can check out by reading the article. For those of us who want companies to behave in socially responsible ways, this experiment provides some research to help us make that case.