The Influence of Corporate Social Responsibility Efforts on the Moral Behavior of Consumers

Prior research has focused on firm level outcomes associated with corporate social responsibility (CSR) efforts, or a company’s activities and status related to its perceived societal or stakeholder obligations (Brown and Dacin 1997), such as financial performance (Orlitzky, Schmidt, and Rynes 2003). However, there is little research, with the exception of cause-related marketing, that focuses on consumer level outcomes associated with CSR practices such as its effects on prosocial (e.g., donations) and antisocial consumer behavior (e.g., cheating). This research will seek to answer when does a firm’s prosocial behavior, defined as actions taken for the benefit of others, and antisocial behavior, defined as actions that are selfserving and do not benefit others, motivate vicarious prosocial and antisocial behaviors in consumers? Kouchaki (2011) finds that individuals can expand their moral self-concept to include psychologically close others, resulting in vicarious moral licensing effects. Accordingly, we propose that for consumers who use brands to expand the self (Aron and Aron 1996), prosocial firm behavior can signal sufficient progress toward the consumer’s goal of being a moral person and motivate antisocial consumer behavior while antisocial firm behavior can signal a lack of goal progress and motivate prosocial consumer behavior. We present three experiments to demonstrate that a firm’s CSR behavior vicariously impacts consumer’s moral behavior, but only for those who include the CSR brand in the self.