Beyond Influence: The Behavioral Blueprint of Ethical and Sustainable Consumer Decision-Making

Abstract

Understanding how psychological and relational forces make decisions sustainable has now become more vital in the emerging ethical consumerism. Specifically, drawing what are termed bonding tactics, as well as trust, customer attitude, sustainable lifestyle and prosocial outcomes, in addition to decision paralysis as a cognitive moderator. This study explores this behavioral blueprint of ethical and sustainable consumer behavior. Thus, it borrows foundational theories including commitment trust theory (Liang & Wang, 2006) and the Theory of Planned Behavior (Ajzen, 1991) to study how relational marketing is translated into ethical action in the emerging economies of Pakistan. The method was a quantitative cross sectional one, where a structural equation modeling (SEM) was undertaken using SmartPLS 4.0. Meanwhile, data was collected from 400 people who are sustainability aware in urban and semi urban areas of Pakistan. The conceptual framework was validated through the tested 10 constructs and their interrelationships, such as mediation and moderation effects. It is found that financial and social bonding tactics have significant effects on trust that mediates consumer attitude and adoption of a sustainable lifestyle. TRU → CA → SL and CB → BI → PB were key supported paths with decision paralysis significantly limiting the path from sustainable lifestyle to consumer behaviour to just be carbonated, or to be feminist, but without actually saying so. Prosocial behavior variance was explained by the final model to the extent of 71%. Through this research, it is first theoretically and then practically widened on the ethical behavior model by incorporating cognitive boundaries, and then explored how managers can simplify ethical decisions. Future cross-cultural and longitudinal validations (Cruz-Cárdenas et al., 2025; Elsantil et al., 2025) are also recommended by it.