Importance of Money, Religiosity, and Spiritual Well-being of Young Fast-Food Consumers, and its Impact on their Ethical Beliefs

Abstract

Building on the revised general theory of marketing ethics that suggests that individual values and attitudes are determinants of unethical beliefs, we examine the impact of importance of money, intrinsic religiosity, and spiritual well-being on the active and illegal dimension of consumers’ ethical beliefs. Using a sample of 426 young fast-food consumers (240 male and 186 female) in a collectivist society (India), we test several hypotheses using moderated regression analysis. For the first time, we test for interaction effects among these three individual determinants of consumer’s ethical beliefs. We also test for the impact of gender on the ethical beliefs. Our study throws new light on the extant understanding of these individual determinants of consumers’ ethical beliefs. We find that neither of the independent variables, namely, importance of money, intrinsic religiosity, and spiritual well-being determines consumers’ ethical beliefs. However, their interaction terms are all significant, suggesting that although the three predictors of consumers’ ethical beliefs may not directly influence their beliefs, it may do so in combination with other predictors. We also find a moderating impact of gender. Intrinsic religiosity positively affects consumers’ ethical beliefs in male customers but not in female customers. Similarly, spiritual well-being positively affects female customers’ ethical beliefs but not male customers. Importance of money does not influence either.