Unpacking the Unethical Gift: Gift Experience and Unethicality Assessment

Abstract

This research investigates how contextual factors affect unethicality assessment of products. The research is conducted in the context of gifts and compares interpersonal gifts (IGs) and self-gifts (SGs) by examining individuals’ reactions in front of unethical gifts. Five experiments investigate how individuals assess product unethicality differently, depending on the source of the gift, being the Self or a gifter. This research employs attribution theory to explain the differences between IGs and SGs and identify psychological distance as a boundary condition for the effect.

Keywords:

• attribution theory
• gift exchange
• unethical consumption
• psychological distance
• unethicality assessment

Notes

¹ Bootstrapping mediation analysis is a procedure that allows for estimating the direct and indirect effects of an independent variable on a dependent variable through a mediator. The mediation analysis tests whether a causal variable X influences the outcome Y through another mediating variable. The analyses reported in this article are based on the computational procedure PROCESS, developed for SPSS use, which allows for the estimation of several regression models. It involves a bootstrapping procedure, that is, a nonparametric method based on resampling with replacement; it was set at 5,000 as suggested by the authors of the procedure. The rationale behind the resample procedure is that larger samples are better than small ones and increase the statistical power (see Hayes, 2012; Preacher & Hayes, 2008; and Preacher, Rucker, & Hayes, 2007, for more details).

² No other significant results were found.