Companies Undermine “Sacred” Values Like Environmentalism When Co-opting Them For Profit Or Prestige

By Emma Young How important is it to you to protect our planet’s wildest places? Would you put a price on it — or is it the kind of goal that just can’t be subject to a cost-benefit analysis? If the latter, then for you, protecting Earth’s wilds is a “sacred value”. Patriotism, or the protection of human lives, or diversity in the workplace can be sacred values, too. So what happens when a for-profit organisation embraces such values — is the pursuit of social or environmental values and profit a “win-win”, as is often claimed? A new paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: Interpersonal Relations and Group Processes, suggests not — and it’s the value that suffers, as it becomes less sacred. If this is right, then businesses that co-opt such values in their advertising (think no end of outdoor clothing companies that make a big deal about caring for the wilderness, as just one example) are degrading the very values that they claim to promote. Rachel L Ruttan at the University of Toronto and Loran F Nordgren at Northwestern University base their conclusions on the results of seven studies on a total of 2,785 participants. In initial studies, participants who read a pro-environment message from a for-profit producer of agricultural equipment subsequently felt that environmentalism was less sacred than did participants who’d read the same message, but from the environmental body Conservation International. T...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: environmental Occupational Source Type: blogs