The latest example is Lance Armstrong, who recently gave up his fight against the US Anti-Doping Agency’s allegations of performance enhancing drug use. The Livestrong organisation he founded to support fellow cancer survivors saw unsolicited donations surge in the wake of his announcement. Two key collaborators, Nike and Anheuser-Busch, decided to continue to sponsor and support Armstrong.
Moral rationalisation, especially in the face of overwhelming evidence of guilt, can be a challenge for consumers. It requires people to reconstrue improper behaviour to make it less improper, to frame it in a different way to make it more palatable. But doing so makes a statement about the consumer’s own morals. It’s a sort of guilt by association, Reed notes, wherein the consumer, in order to maintain support for the public figure, has to justify, excuse and, in some cases, be permissive toward behaviour many may find truly objectionable.
Moral decoupling is different, however. By disassociating morality from actions, a person can wholeheartedly support the public figure without being subject to self-reproach.
“Moral decoupling enables individuals to acknowledge that a public figure has engaged in an immoral act, but argue that this act should not influence judgments of performance,” the authors write.
“Because moral decoupling does not involve condoning immoral acts, employing this strategy poses less danger of compromising one’s moral standards. Thus, we expect that a moral decoupling strategy will feel less wrong and be easier to justify than a moral rationalisation strategy. In sum, moral decoupling allows consumers to ‘tip their hat’ and admire the performance of a public figure while simultaneously ‘wagging their finger’ and admonishing his immoral actions.”
A free pass for the consumer
Bhattacharjee and Berman, under Reed’s supervision, ran six studies to test the theory of moral decoupling. In the studies, participants were given scenarios describing moral transgressions by public figures and asked a series of questions that revealed their feelings about the situation. As predicted, participants’ answers revealed a type of moral reasoning argument quite different from moral rationalisation.
In particular, these arguments hinged on separating morality and performance, rather than adjusting judgments of morality. Whether participants read a set of moral rationalisation versus moral decoupling arguments and chose the one that best described their own views, or whether the authors assessed the content of participants’ responses, as expressed in their own words, these differences were striking and consistent.
Two of the six studies brought out an interesting twist in the research. An important goal of the research team was to explore whether participants would opt for a moral rationalisation strategy over a moral decoupling strategy when the transgression was highly relevant to performance and thus harder to decouple. For example, a baseball player who uses steroids or a politician who evades taxes makes moral decoupling more difficult than a baseball player who evades taxes or a politician who uses steroids. While these expected differences did emerge, moral decoupling was still the favoured reasoning strategy overall, accounting for about two-thirds of participants’ choices. Hence, this form of reasoning seems to be quite appealing to participants, the researchers say.
The study has direct, real-world implications for professionals in the fields of sales, marketing and public relations – or anyone responsible for branding and rebranding a public image in the face of controversy. These people “want to create conditions” – during the time they are framing the issue and putting out press releases – that allow them “to take steps to encourage moral decoupling,” Reed says. “You saw this with Tiger Woods and a little bit with Michael Vick.”
Vick, a football player with the Atlanta Falcons, was enjoying a respected career in the NFL before he was arrested in connection with illegal dog fighting. Investigators revealed that Vick was running a kennel where dogs were raised and trained, under cruel conditions, to fight each other to the death. Vick ultimately went to jail, but is now the quarterback for the Philadelphia Eagles.
“People may think, ‘Well, he served his time, and it’s only a dog.’ But not many people are going to make that argument out loud,” Reed notes. “They will say that it has nothing to do with him playing for the Eagles. You try to build that rhetoric with your consumers.”
Ultimately, moral decoupling allows the consumer to do what he or she really wants to do. “We find it’s easier to justify and make a moral decoupling argument rather than a moral rationalisation” one, Reed says. “It has all these nice psychological benefits for the consumer. It’s a nicer get-out-of-jail-free card for the consumer to use.”
There is a special twist on this in the Lance Armstrong example. Armstrong is accused of doing something illegal that helped him perform better at his sport. Thus, decoupling performance from morality will be difficult, Reed notes. However, he adds, in the minds of the public, there are essentially two different Lance Armstrongs: “cancer survivor and philanthropist Lance,” and “elite cyclist and seven-time Tour de France winner Lance.”
And as the research shows, those who desire to continue to support Armstrong can morally decouple by focusing on the particularly high level of moral goodness that surrounds his efforts to raise millions for cancer research. These supporters will simply not touch on the whole doping issue, Reed says, suggesting that perhaps this is what Nike, Anheuser-Busch and even Livestrong are banking on. “From a marketing point of view, it’s relative to the brand and protecting the brand.”
The research team wants to expand its work on moral decoupling by seeing what would happen if a company employed this strategy in the aftermath of a consumer crisis. But doing so poses a challenge for the researchers, because they must find a company willing to test this hypothesis while so much is riding on the outcome. “[Since] most of the argument is speculative, we want to show that if you employ the strategy in the field in real time, you can quantify their brand protection in some way,” Reed says. “We also want to understand in what circumstances the strategy will fail.”
As for Tiger Woods, his brand cachet has “completely dropped” over time, Reed notes. But it’s hard to say whether moral decoupling has played any part in that. Woods’ career has steadily declined in recent years with his consistently poor performance on the golf course. Moral decoupling will fail if one separates morality from performance, and then performance goes south. In the end, the authors note, everyone loves a winner.
