On Whom You Spend, There Your Ethics Will Be: The Combined Effect of Spending and Construal Level on Ethical Behavior

Prior research has documented the strong link between money and unethicality. Our research extends previous findings by focusing on a different aspect of money: spending behavior, or on whom the money is spent. The current study integrates the spending literature and the construal level perspective to propose that individuals’ ethical behavior is determined by whom they spend their money on (the self or others) and how they think (abstractly/high-level or concretely/low-level). Experimental data show that under a high-level construal, people who spent money on others behaved more ethically than those who spent money on themselves. Under a low-level construal, however, neither prosocial nor personal spending influenced subsequent behavior related to an ethical dilemma. Thus, while people spend money on others, they should adopt an abstract, high-level construal to maintain greater integrity with regard to subsequent ethical dilemmas.