Research

How should firms best communicate their corporate social responsibility efforts? Across seven preregistered studies (N = 148,904; two large field studies and five online lab experiments), we find that defining donations as a series of periodic contributions (e.g., $20,000 per month for 12 months), rather than an equivalent aggregate amount (e.g., $240,000 this year), improves the results for donor companies such as reputation, consumer engagement, and probability of purchase. The benefits of periodic framing are driven primarily by heightened perceptions of the donor’s authentic prosocial motivation, which affects judgments and outcomes in two ways. Via one process pathway, the consistency of periodic donations increases perceptions that the donor gave due to authentic prosocial motives, which then increases favorable judgments of the donor. Via a second process pathway, heightened perceptions of the donor’s authentic prosocial motivation also increase the perceived impact of the donation, further boosting favorable donor judgments. Additional studies demonstrate why the current research shows reputational benefits due to periodic donations even while other recently published research shows an opposite effect. Taken together, this research highlights consumers’ sensitivity to cues of consistency, and the importance of perceived authentic prosocial motivation, when consumers grant charitable credit in CSR.

Companies often invite consumers to join them in charitable donation initiatives as part of their corporate social responsibility (CSR) efforts. While such involvement is typically intended to enhance the initiatives’ prosocial impact, we propose that these appeals can sometimes backfire—a phenomenon we term the join-us penalty. Across four preregistered studies, we find that when companies invite customers to participate in their CSR efforts, consumers evaluate the company less favorably than when no such invitation is made. This effect arises from consumers’ perceptions about a company’s prosocial responsibility. Specifically, because consumers tend to perceive entities with greater resources as bearing greater prosocial obligation, inviting consumers to donate can be seen as the company shirking their prosocial responsibility. We further identify key boundary conditions of the join-us penalty, showing that 1) who the company invites and 2) what the company requests in their donations moderate the effect.

Recent research has identified vivid instances where individuals go to great lengths to avoid donation requests. Such observations appear at odds with separate, extensive literature about the warm glow of giving, showing that people often experience happiness when they engage in generosity. Across three preregistered experiments (N = 3,401), we work to help reconcile these two conflicting sets of observations. We find that compliance pressure, an element of many donation appeals, leads to a compromised warm glow of giving. We propose that this pattern arises because compliance pressure reduces donors’ sense of autonomy, which then negatively affects the warm glow of giving as well as potentially negatively affects consumers’ interest in future donations. Taken together, this research shows that warm glow is not an automatic outcome of generosity, but rather, one that depends on the context in which giving occurs.

Individuals often receive gifts they do not like or want, and so they often face a decision: do they share how they feel about a bad gift and potentially hurt the giver’s feelings, or do they hide the truth about how much they like the gift? Concealment is typical: recipients frequently choose to hide their true feelings, even though hiding the truth can have other unwanted consequences. The current research suggests that this tendency to withhold negative but honest feedback is driven in part by recipients’ confidence in their ability to convincingly hide their disappointment. This tendency also contributes to the persistent misalignment between what recipients want and what givers choose to give them, as givers often remain unaware of how recipients really feel about their gifts.

Consumers often encounter discrepancies in product ratings between those listed on a brand’s official website (first-party ratings) and those on independent, third-party websites (third-party ratings). For example, a consumer might want to stay at a particular hotel (e.g., the Marriott Los Angeles) and find that the rating of this hotel is different on the hotel’s own website (e.g., Marriott.com) and a website not controlled by the hotel (e.g., TripAdvisor.com). We consistently find, across both field data and experiments, that consumers are more likely to purchase from a brand if a product’s rating is lower on the brand’s own website than on external platforms. This finding, which was not expected by marketing managers, is driven by perceptions of brand credibility, which are more positive when first-party ratings are lower than third-party ratings.