Doing Worse by Doing Good: How Corporate Social Responsibility Makes Products Less Dangerous

In recent years, much research has focused on the impact of CSR on business activity, showing that by investing in CSR companies can “do well by doing good” (Chernev & Blair, 2015;Du, Bhattacharya, & Sen, 2007; Orlitzky, Schmidt, & Rynes, 2003). Chernev and Blair (2015), for instance, have demonstrated that CSR activities can create a “halo effect” inducing consumers to evaluate more positively the performance of products of companies involved in prosocial actions. In the specific case of controversial companies, i.e. companies producing products that could be dangerous for heath, environment or the society, the literature also seems to convey a rather positive view of CSR investments (Cai, Jo, & Pan, 2012; Yoon, Gürhan‐Canli, & Schwarz, 2006). However, this literature has mainly focused on the positive effect of CSR on the image or financial performance of companies without paying much attention to the potentially harmful effects on consumers. In this research, we question whether products that are explicitly presented as hazardous to health or the environment can be perceived as less dangerous because of the company’s involvement in charitable actions. If we refer to the vast majority of research conducted in the field of impression formation (e.g. Baumeister, 2001; Skowronski & Carlston, 1989), the natural answer to this question seems rather to be no. Indeed, it has been repeatedly shown that the know negative characteristics of a person or an object exert a stronger influence on its overall evaluation than his or its positive characteristics (Baumeister, 2001). However, the literature also points out that to form their impression people rely on the available informational cues that are the less ambiguous (e.g. Wyer, 1973). Based on this premise, we hypothesize that the dangerous nature of a product sold by a company can be difficult to assess and therefore perceived as relatively ambiguous by the target contrary to the prosocial actions undertaken by the organization. In sum, we expect consumers to infer that a product sold by a socially engaged company cannot really be dangerous.