Fluency and the perceived ethicality of corporate social (ir)responsibility

Abstract

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has remained a focus in business and society for decades. Existing research, however, has only begun to examine moral violations, or incidences of corporate social irresponsibility (CSI). In this article, we identify perceptual fluency—the ease with which information is processed—as an influential factor. Through three experiments, we reveal that individuals view incidences of CSI as less unethical when perceptual fluency is low (vs. high). This occurs because decreased perceptual fluency encourages deliberative processing, which impacts the perceived ethicality of CSI incidences. These results replicate across different countries, product categories, and CSI typologies. We also identify the type of corporate action as an important boundary condition; as perceptual fluency did not impact the perceived ethicality of analogous CSR incidences. We also find that the effect is influenced by the individual moral philosophy of the consumer, with the effect occurring only for those higher in moral relativism. Overall, these results empirically disentangle competing theoretical accounts linking perceptual fluency with moral judgment, and show that businesses and other parties should consider the fluency of CSI communications along with the moral philosophy of their customers and other stakeholders.