Marketing Seminar（2016-18）

Title: Witnessing moral violations increases conformity in consumption

Speaker: Ping Dong, University of Toronto

Time: Monday, 21 November.13:30-15:00

Place: Room217, Guanghua Building 2

Abstract:

Consumers frequently encounter moral violations (e.g., financial scandal, cheating, and corruption) in their daily life. Yet little is known about how exposure to moral violations may affect consumer choice. By synthesizing insights from research on social order and conformity, we propose that mere exposure to others’ immoral behaviors heightens perceived threat to social order, which increases consumers’ endorsement of conformist attitudes and hence their preferences for majority-endorsed choices in subsequently unrelated consumption situations. Five studies conducted across different experimental contexts and different product categories provided convergent evidence showing that exposure to moral violations increases consumers’ subsequent conformity in consumption. Moreover, we show that the effect disappears (a) when consumers perceive having abundant (vs. scarce) social support, (b) when the moral violator has already been punished by third parties, and (c) when the majority-endorsed option is viewed as being complicit with the moral violation. This research not only demonstrates a novel downstream consequence of witnessing moral violations on consumer choice but also advances our understanding of how conformity can buffer the negative psychological consequences of moral violations and how moral considerations can serve as an important basis for consumer choice.

Introduction：

Ping Dong is a fifth year Ph.D. Candidate in Marketing at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. Her research focuses on understanding the social influences on consumer behavior. She is particularly interested in uncovering factors that affect consumers’ decision to conform to others’ preferences (as opposed to seeking uniqueness). Her research has been published in leading marketing and psychology journals including the Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Psychological Science, and Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, and has been featured in popular media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review and Globe and Mail. In her dissertation research, she studies the effects of moral violations on consumers’ subsequent conformity tendency in consumption using both lab experiments and archival data analysis. Her dissertation proposal was recently selected as a co-winner of the 2015 ACR-Sheth Foundation Dissertation Proposal Award.

Your participation is warmly welcomed!