Consumers' moral licensing of firms' CSR transgressions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Despite corporate social responsibility (CSR) engagement, firms may be implicated in CSR transgressions. Research is equivocal on whether CSR buffers negative consumer responses to subsequent firm transgressions. This research extends the observer moral licensing framework to consumer‐firm contexts and examines under what conditions consumers license transgressions following firms' CSR engagement. Study 1 demonstrates that consumer responses to firm transgressions depend on whether the transgression occurs in the same (vs. different) domain relative to CSR engagement and on transgression ambiguity. Study 2 shows that consumer responses to transgressions are less negative when a firm has (vs. has not) previously engaged in CSR. It replicates a shielding effect of CSR that is contingent on transgression domain relative to prior CSR and transgression ambiguity, and finds that blatant same domain transgressions generate hypocrisy perceptions and mitigate licensing effects. Study 3 further extends the moral licensing framework and shows that firm communication that situates CSR efforts on a continuum (continuous CSR positioning) before a transgression moderates, and insincere firm motive attributions mediate, the detrimental effect of blatant same domain transgressions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".