We like to think of ourselves as moral people – but how does that actually influence how we behave as consumers, workers, and citizens? In a new project, UBS Foundation Professor Roberto Weber will explore how people’s moral values shape their decisions in markets and their support for policies. He will identify how such concerns can be employed to produce desirable societal outcomes. For this project, Prof. Weber has been awarded a SNSF grant of CHF 969,873.

The four-year project, starting in 2026, is organized around three broad themes, each explored through a series of laboratory, online, and survey experiments across multiple populations and countries.

Moral market behavior through self-governance

The first asks whether people can agree, as a group, to hold themselves to higher moral standards even when doing so is costly. For example, can consumers collectively commit to buying ethical but more expensive products or can workers in an industry agree to forgo potential earnings from socially harmful activities? How are the outcomes from such agreements impacted by the diverse motivations and moral values of people involved?

Contextual influences on moral behavior

The second theme investigates how the design of a choice situation can facilitate moral behavior. This includes understanding whether people are primarily motivated to act morally by a desire to have positive impacts or because they wish to perceive their actions as morally correct and how these distinct motives can be harnessed to promote moral conduct. The research also investigates how past moral acts influence future ones, providing insights into how choices can be structured to produce more moral behavior.

Morality and aversion to financial factors in health policy

The third theme studies the roles of moral motives in support for policy. To what degree do people perceive specific policies as “immoral” even when they expect such policies will produce positive social and economic outcomes? For example, is aversion to financial incentives in healthcare, including paying people to get vaccinated, driven by such concerns? What role does aversion to financial considerations play in support for controversial policies, such as assisted dying, where concerns about patients’ finances or public healthcare costs might be relevant for policy outcomes?

Together, the three themes reflect a research agenda that draws on economics, psychology, and moral philosophy to understand when and how moral considerations shape individual behavior and collective outcomes – and how that knowledge can be put to work.