Retracted: Witnessing Moral Violations Increases Conformity in Consumption

Abstract

This research is based on part of the first author's doctoral dissertation under the guidance of the second author. The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support from the Sheth Foundation through the 2015 ACR/Sheth Foundation Dissertation Award and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. We thank Bob Wyer and Avni Shah for their insightful comments. We also thank Rachel Hung, Keiron Narine, Zohra Abdul Razaq, and Jenny Wang for their excellent assistance in data collection. In determining sample size, we generally followed the rule of thumb of having 50 participants per cell. Data were collected in a single wave and were analyzed only after all the data were collected. We report all data exclusions (if any), all manipulations, and all measures in the paper. Data files are available at: https://osf.io/wdu5e. Contribution Statement Previous research has established that moral violations are often recognized as breaches of social order, and mere exposure to others' immoral behaviors can heighten individuals' desire for punishment of moral transgressors (to correct transgressions) and social-norm adherence (to prevent future transgressions), which are precisely what conformist attitudes entail. Yet we know little about how exposure to moral violations may affect consumer choice, despite the fact that consumers are constantly exposed to immoral behaviors in daily life. Drawing on past research on social order and conformity, we propose that witnessing moral violations heightens perceived threat to social order, which can increase individuals' endorsement of conformist attitudes, since conformity can serve both a defensive function against the occurrence of moral transgressions and a reparative function signaling social order. The heightened desire for conformist attitudes can generalize and manifest in preferences for majority-endorsed (vs. minority-endorsed) choice alternatives in consumption domains. This research thus provides fresh insights to the morality and conformity literature by (a) documenting a novel downstream consequence of exposure to moral violations on consumer choice and (b) advancing our understanding of the psychological functions of conformity in coping with negative consequences of witnessing moral violations.

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