Fight or flight: how advertising for air travel triggers moral disengagement

Fight or flight: how advertising for air travel triggers moral disengagement

Fossil ads can help people to legitimize and normalize their harmful behaviour. Awareness campaigns don’t moderate that effect. “The study shows that it might be problematic to blame individuals for the full environmental damage of their consumption choices when they are simultaneously confronted with advertising messages every day. As long as status is assigned to flying, may it be through advertisements, articles or travel bloggers, individuals will have a social incentive to fly – and to morally disengage from their actions.”

Abstract

Advertising frequently promotes environmentally detrimental consumption choices such as air travel. To date, the effects of these ads on individuals’ moral evaluation of unsustainable behaviors are still little understood. This study with a quota-based sample in Germany (N = 199) explored whether individuals morally disengage from the harmfulness of flying due to ad exposure. Based on the theory of moral disengagement (Bandura, 2016, Moral disengagement: How people do harm and live with themselves. Worth Publishers), we investigated whether individuals neglect negative consequences, seek moral justification or displace responsibility for flying behaviors after seeing flight advertising. The results suggested that individuals low in climate change concern become more neglectful of the consequences of flying, while climate change concerned individuals exhibited the opposite reaction. Irrespective of individuals’ level of climate change concern, ad exposure increased recipients’ displacement of responsibility to other actors. Moreover, we found a correlation between mechanisms of moral disengagement and flying intentions as well as support for aviation policies.