COLUMBUS – Do you feel a little intimidated when trying to choose products that are grown or manufactured ethically, doing as little harm as possible to people or the environment?
You are not alone. Many of us are not up to the task, according to research from OSU.
Shoppers don’t want to work very hard to find out whether their favorite products were made ethically and we really don’t like people who do. In fact, we dismiss them as “less fashionable and more boring” and then shop less carefully ourselves, says Rebecca Walker Reczek, associate professor of marketing at The Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business.
“It is this vicious cycle. You choose not to find out if a product is made ethically. Then you harshly judge people who do consider ethical values when buying products. Then that makes you less ethical in the future,” she said.
She says companies that use ethical practices should prominently display that information, on their packages if possible, because consumers are not willing to look up the company’s good deeds on its website.
Reczek conducted the study, published online in the Journal of Consumer Psychology, with Daniel Zane, a graduate student at Ohio State’s Fisher College, and Julie Irwin, a professor of marketing at the University of Texas at Austin.
In earlier research, Irwin had found that consumers will consider ethical information, such as whether a product was made using fair labor practices and in an environmentally friendly way, if it is readily available, such as on product packaging but won’t go through the trouble of looking on a website or asking a salesperson.
For the new research, Reczek, Irwin and Zane conducted several experiments to determine the consequences of this “willful ignorance.”
In one experiment, participants who were given the opportunity to find out whether a brand of blue jeans was made with child labor chose to remain “willfully ignorant,” asking for information on delivery time instead.
Asked to rate consumers who would choose to research clothing manufacturers’ labor practices before buying, the participants were more likely to describe the ethical shoppers as “odd, boring and less fashionable, among other negative traits,” Reczek said.
“Willfully ignorant consumers put ethical shoppers down because of the threat they feel for not having done the right thing themselves,” she said. “They feel bad and striking back at the ethical consumers makes themselves feel better.”
In a third study, consumers who didn’t consider environmental concerns when choosing a backpack – and denigrated those consumers who did — were less likely to later support a pro-sustainability “Think Green Pledge” online.
“After you denigrate consumers who act ethically concerning a specific issue, you actually care a little less about that specific issue yourself,” Reczek said.
Reczek said the results of this study suggest consumers want to do the right thing; they just need help to do it and companies can help by making their ethical practices easier to see.
“If consumers don’t see ethical information right when they are shopping, there can be this cascade of negative consequences,” Reczek said.