How customers respond to environmental corporate social responsibility (CSI): An experimental vignette and eye-tracking study

Li, Xinwei 2024. How customers respond to environmental corporate social responsibility (CSI): An experimental vignette and eye-tracking study. PhD Thesis, Cardiff University. Item availability restricted.

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Abstract

In the current digital era, customers can openly and freely discuss any misconduct of the corporation, and people’s opinions about corporations are mainly shaped by social media. Notwithstanding existing literature about customer response behaviour to corporate negative events has well demonstrated the impact of negative events on customers’ attitudes and behaviour toward company, current works remain silent over the effects of different attributes of Corporate social irresponsibility (CSI) news on customer response in the social media environment. Moreover, environmental issues often provoke severe reactions, and sustainable business operations have been identified as a future trend. Hence, this research seeks to help businesses understand how consumer responses to environmental CSI social media news about corporate misconduct in manufacturing and production, exploring consumers’ emotional responses as well as behavioural responses to corporate infractions, and evaluating the cognitive processes underlying consumers’ behaviour decisions. Furthermore, this study not only aims to examine the causal relationship between CSI news attributes and customer response but is also interested in exploring the cognitive process underlying their response behaviour. Therefore, this investigation further complements the findings from the first study with eye-tracking techniques to capture customers’ eye movement, examining the causality between customer’s visual attention and their final response decision. Building on the Attribution Theory, Conformity Theory, and Parallel Constraint Satisfaction Models, this research conducts a 2 x 2 x 2 experimental vignette study with eye-tracking techniques, using a national sample of 325 UK adults. Overall, results show that the presence of evidence and a higher harmfulness level of CSI events does not evoke a higher degree of emotional response (i.e., negative moral emotions) or a higher degree of negative response behaviour (i.e., negative word-of-mouth (WOM), boycott intention, share intention). Results also provide evidence of customers’ conformity behaviour on social media, indicating that critical comments significantly drive to higher level of negative responses toward the company. Moreover, results present that there is a statistically significant three-way interaction between evidence, harmfulness, and comment on customer’s negative WOM, providing support that when the CSI event is evidence-based and with low harm, online CSI news which is followed with critical comments, will result in remarkable higher levels of negative WOM than social media CSI news with supportive comments. Lastly, eye-tracking results provide some surprising findings that the collective opinions (i.e., comments) significantly and negatively moderated the relationship between the visual attention to comment and the degree of negative response, iii higher visual attention leading to a lower level of negative response when customers encounter a critical comment rather than supportive comments

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Date Type:	Completion
Status:	Unpublished
Schools:	Schools > Business (Including Economics)
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Corporate social irresponsibility (CSI), manufacturing misconduct, production pollution, social media, visual attention, cognitive process, eye-tracking, crisis communication, experimental vignette.
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	16 April 2025
Date of Acceptance:	16 April 2025
Last Modified:	16 Apr 2025 15:43
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/177761

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