Cultural Drivers of Vice–Virtue Preferences: The Role of Justification and Trait Self‐Control
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT Despite extensive research on contextual factors affecting consumer behavior in the vice‐virtue dilemma, the role of cultural dimensions in these choices remains underexplored. By reviewing two streams of research (i.e., justification and trait self‐control), this article examines the impact of Hofstede's indulgence versus restraint cultural dimension on the preferences between vice and virtue products in the contexts of snack consumption and environmentally friendly versus unfriendly behaviors. Two surveys examining vice–virtue choice were conducted via Prolific in Canada, the U.S., and Germany. Study 1 ( n = 213) focused on snack consumption, while Study 2 ( n = 242) explored environmentally friendly versus unfriendly behaviors. The findings confirmed that individuals with higher indulgence (i.e., lower restraint) are more likely to choose vice over virtue options. Moreover, the effect of indulgence versus restraint on vice–virtue choice is sequentially mediated: indulgence influences trait self‐control, which in turn affects justification, ultimately guiding the choice. Justification mediates the relationship between indulgence and vice–virtue choice, while self‐control mediates the effect of indulgence on justification. These findings highlight the importance of considering cultural values in developing marketing strategies for vice and virtue products and in promoting healthier and more sustainable behaviors.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 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) | 0.000 | 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".