Fictitious consumer responsibility? Quantifying social desirability bias in corporate social responsibility surveys

Abstract

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) surveys repeatedly indicate significant consumer interest in products and services of businesses that follow virtuous business practices. Yet the existence of a causal relationship between company responsibility and its financial performance is a contested area, and clear evidence that CSR would create a competitive advantage is missing. As ethical evaluations are deeply embedded in responsibility, this discrepancy casts doubt on the genuineness of the integrity consumers express in surveys. A social desirability (SD) bias leading to fictitious responsibility—be it an intentional attempt to appear ethical or an unconscious tendency to exaggerate moral behaviour—is thus plausible and it threatens the reliability of research in the field. Despite this, a SD bias construct is mostly excluded from CSR marketing research, an omission likely due to a lack of appropriate measurement tools. The aim of this article is to narrow this gap and construct a SD bias variable that can be employed to control statistical analysis. Data collected using the Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding is used to develop a new, continuous scale variable for SD bias. The results support the reliability of the new variable and the robustness of the development process. The subsequent ability to include SD bias in statistical models opens exciting opportunities to improve the value of consumer-oriented CSR surveys by highlighting the difference between fictitious and genuine consumer integrity and offering tools to quantify the severity of the former. This article is published as part of a collection on integrity and its counterfeits.