In the nascent interdisciplinary subfield of responsible management, researchers have approached the rapidly escalating climate emergency and growing global inequalities afflicting the world primarily from macro-institutional and political economy perspectives. Although valuable, these approaches largely overlook micro (and meso) level factors that have the potential to offer more nuanced, person x situational explanations of why some organizational stakeholders are seeking to address these major dysfunctions, whereas other stakeholders are continuing to make choices that are fueling them. To help rectify this scholarly imbalance, the present paper outlines a microfoundational approach for illuminating the cognitive bases of decision-makers' judgments and choices regarding (ir)responsible management practices. We conjecture that decision makers with diverse values, chronic information processing preferences, and senses of agency favor varied choices, based on simplified representations of the decision dilemmas confronting them, each of which require them to strike delicate balances pertaining to ethicality, sustainability, responsibility, and financial viability — the defining pillars of responsible management. To test this theory, we advocate policy capturing, an especially powerful set of techniques for investigating topics of a sensitive nature.
