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Full-Text Articles in Business

The Power Of Sameness, Singapore Management University Sep 2018

The Power Of Sameness, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

Whether it is our name, hometown or personal characteristic, our similarities could alter our reactions to service failures


To Give Or Not To Give? Choosing Chance Under Moral Conflict, Stephanie C. Lin, Taly Reich Apr 2018

To Give Or Not To Give? Choosing Chance Under Moral Conflict, Stephanie C. Lin, Taly Reich

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Although prior research suggests that people should not prefer random chance to determine their outcomes, we propose that in the context of prosocial requests, a contingent of people prefer to rely on chance. We argue that this is because they are conflicted between losing resources (e.g., time, money) and losing moral selfregard. Across five studies, in both choices with binary outcomes (whether to volunteer) and ranges of outcomes (how much to donate), some people preferred to be randomly assigned an outcome rather than to make their own choices. This did not negatively affect prosocial behavior in binary choices and improved …


Projecting Lower Competence To Maintain Moral Warmth In The Avoidance Of Prosocial Requests, Peggy J. Liu, Stephanie C. Lin Jan 2018

Projecting Lower Competence To Maintain Moral Warmth In The Avoidance Of Prosocial Requests, Peggy J. Liu, Stephanie C. Lin

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

When faced with prosocial requests, consumers face a difficult decision between taking on the request’s burden or appearing unwarm (unkind, uncaring). We propose that the desire to refuse such requests while protecting a morally warm image leads consumers to under-represent their competence. Although consumers care strongly about being viewed as competent, five studies showed that they downplayed their competence to sidestep a prosocial request. This effect occurred across both self-reported and behavioral displays of competence. Further, the downplaying competence effect only occurred when facing an undesirable prosocial request, not a similarly undesirable proself request. The final studies showed that people …