Corporate Social Responsibility and Dishonest Consumer Behavior

Increasingly, organizations are proclaiming their values by taking stands on controversial social issues. These actions often take the form of corporate social responsibility (CSR). However, little research investigates polarizing CSR issues. Although CSR can influence purchase behavior toward the organization (e.g., boycotting), we propose a novel way in which consumers may respond to polarizing CSR: dishonest consumer behavior, i.e., the extent to which consumers lie and cheat the organization for financial rewards. Dishonest consumer behaviors are highly costly for organizations. For example, return fraud and abuse were expected to cost retailers about $22.8 billion in 2017 (Total Retail 2018). Thus, investigating factors that impact dishonest behavior is important from a theoretical and practical perspective. We propose that the effect of CSR on dishonest behavior depends on the consumer’s cause-related identity, which refers to the degree of fit between the CSR cause and the consumer’s self-concept (Sen and Bhattacharya 2001; Winterich and Barone 2011). Although prior work on CSR considers the effects of cause-related identity, it does not examine incongruent or oppositional identity. In contrast, we view cause-related identity as a continuum from congruent to neutral to incongruent, where incongruent cause-related identity is conceptualized as one that is the opposite of the consumer’s self-concept (Reed et al. 2012).