The Effect of Regulatory Focus on Ethical Decision-Making

Regulatory focus is a goal attainment theory that states that people use one of two self-regulations to achieve their goals. The first self-regulation is promotion; promotion focused people are risk-takers, they are more likely to use heuristics or biases to make decisions, and they make decisions quickly. The other self-regulation is prevention; these people are risk-averse, they are more likely to use analytic reasoning to make decisions, and they make decisions slowly. In this study, the authors measured the participants’ work regulatory focus and then attempted to manipulate them into one of the two conditions (prevention or promotion). The manipulation was not strong enough to influence the participants’ regulatory focus. For this reason, the study was completed using the chronic work regulatory focus. The authors aimed to determine how the participants’ work regulatory focus affected their ethical decision making on three cases (two university situations and one career situation). Overall, promotion focused participants we more likely than prevention focused participants to partake in the unethical behavior. These results were only significant for Cases 1 and 2, which is believed to be because the students could relate better to these situations than the career situation (Case 3).