Fluency and the perceived ethicality of corporate social (ir)responsibility
通过三个实验发现，信息处理流畅性低时，人们会认为企业社会不负责任行为不那么不道德，因为低流畅性促使深思熟虑加工，且该效应受消费者道德相对主义影响。
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.