Editor’s Note: This essay is adapted from Every Purchase Matters: How Fair Trade Farmers, Companies, and Consumers Are Changing the World (Hachette Book Group, 2025) by Paul Rice, founder of Fair Trade USA.
If the goal of more conscious capitalism is to create shared value for all the stakeholders involved, this raises an important question: What’s in it for the consumer? The value to producers and businesses is more straightforward. But what value does someone derive from buying an organic cotton T-shirt or non-GMO milk? What do consumers get out of the deal?
For some ethically sourced products, particularly organically certified ones, the answer to this question is a little clearer. People often buy organic food because they believe it’s healthier. A 2021 study published in the PLOS One journal found that perceived health benefits were by far the biggest motivator for consumers to purchase organic products. But the equation is different when it comes to social sustainability labels like those applied by Fair Trade USA (which I founded), and other Fair Trade credentialing organizations around the world. When a consumer makes a purchase that they know will have a net positive impact on the people and communities that made the product, there’s apparently nothing in it for them, materially speaking. It’s an act of altruism—of care, compassion, and solidarity. They’re often paying a higher price for an ethically sourced product so that someone they’ve never met and never will meet—the farmer or worker—can have a better life.
This logic, in a sense, flies in the face of traditional notions of consumption. It contradicts Adam Smith’s economic theories holding that we are all self-interested beings acting only for our own benefit. But in truth, consumers often do prefer socially responsible products that benefit others. We can see this in the data—for example, a 2021 IBM survey found that 84 percent of surveyed consumers consider sustainability important when choosing a brand—not to mention in the growth of the ethical sourcing movement as a whole and the popularity of mission-driven brands like Patagonia, Ben & Jerry’s, Tom’s Shoes, and Warby Parker.
A growing body of research on the neuroscience of altruism and kindness illuminates why we exhibit these behaviors. John Ballatt and Penelope Campling, for example, in their 2011 book Intelligent Kindness: Reforming the Culture of Healthcare, explore the effects that kindness can have on the human brain. Individual acts of kindness, they find, release both endorphins and oxytocin and create new neural connections. In other words, it feels good to be kind.
Human action bears out this hypothesis. In 2023, 69 percent of Americans donated to charity. Sixty-three million people in the United States, or 23 percent of the total population, volunteered their time and energy for a nonprofit organization. Almost 7 million people donate blood every year in this country, and most will never meet the recipient of their donation. There is abundant evidence that people care.
This research and data resonates with me. I believe the evidence around the psychological benefit we get when we behave with kindness and caring toward others translates to our behavior as consumers. When we buy products that seem more ethical or good for the world, we feel good about ourselves. We feel a sense of purpose, connection, and belonging. These are powerful emotional needs that are increasingly motivating us as consumers to seek products that resonate with our values and how we want to perceive ourselves.
At this point, I can hear the pessimist in me saying, “That’s bulls—.” Or wishful thinking, at best. Skeptics might suggest that altruism and kindness are optional behaviors that will always yield to self-interest. They might dismiss ethical purchases as a kind of emotional salve that privileged people occasionally use to ease their guilty consciences. Because they’re harder to measure, the emotional benefits of conscious consumerism—as opposed to volunteering or giving blood—are still not well understood. But to outright deny the possibility of these benefits ignores something corporate marketers have long known: Psychology matters. Feeling good about ourselves motivates many of our purchasing decisions, far beyond the realm of sustainability.
Think about how companies advertise cars, apparel, cosmetics, and smartphones. It’s all about status, beauty, excitement, or coolness—that is, when we buy things, we’re acquiring more than just their physical product features and functionalities. We’re also getting an array of emotional benefits that actually may be as important as the tangible products themselves.
I believe it’s the same with ethically sourced products. When you buy a bag of coffee that you know was grown by farmers who were paid fairly for their work and were able to keep their kids in school, you get a little hit of goodness. When you buy a pair of jeans sewn in a factory where you know workers had good working conditions, you get an ego boost for being a “good person.” Simply put, feeling good about our purchases can help us feel good about ourselves—and that benefit can be a powerful motivator.
In a 2021 United Kingdom-based study published in the journal Social Policy and Administration, a team of researchers from the London School of Economics found that consumers reported significant benefits from purchasing Fair Trade products. In particular, they talked about the benefit “resulting from the feeling of doing the right thing” as one of the main reasons they purchased Fair Trade items. From all of this, the researchers concluded what conscious capitalists all intuitively know: “Market transactions can no longer be construed simply as private actions for reciprocal private gain; the transaction is imbued, at least for the ethical consumer, with some objective of public or social benefit.”
In an interview, supply chain sustainability expert Tristan LeComte referenced research that found that the centers of the brain that light up for feelings of compassion are also responsible for happiness. In other words, practicing compassion via ethical purchases might literally make us happier. A team of researchers at the University of Georgia also published a study in 2016 mapping the neurological effects of altruistic behavior, finding that “engaging in altruistic behavior has both psychological and physical benefits, including easement of anxiety/depression, self-reported improvement in general well-being, and lower likelihood of developing serious illness.”
All of this research makes sense. Human beings aren’t instinctually “lone wolves,” nor are we independent agents acting solely out of self-interest all the time. We are wired for connection, and in our modern lives, we continue to be deeply involved in complex social and cultural networks. Yet, in our globalized economy, we often lack a direct connection with many of the basic ingredients of our lives. Think about it. Go to the kitchen and open up your refrigerator. Do you know who grew your food?
One of the most powerful elements of buying ethically sourced products is that it gives us a chance to connect with the source and story of so many objects in our lives. Retailers know this. It’s why many produce sections in grocery stores today now have pictures of farmers. Or why there has been an explosion of interest in farmers’ markets around the United States over the past quarter century.
Of course, knowing the name of the farmer who picked your tomatoes, or buying products with ethical certifications like Fair Trade can’t perfectly fulfill this desire for connection; they are a substitute for a more direct connection. But they help move us in that direction. They make us at least think for a brief moment about the people across the supply chains that bring products into our lives. They add faces, real or imagined, to the often faceless system of global commerce. This is a real, emotional benefit to consumers, one that more and more of us are seeking.
