| Although everyone has been a victim of unfair events, little is known about how such experiences affect consumers. This work investigated the psychological impact of unfair events on consumer choice. Building on the cognitive appraisal theory of emotions and social justice research, I propose a conceptual framework that accounts for why unfair events encourage people to favor "self-protective choices," or choices that minimize exposure to future losses. Unfair events highlight one's vulnerability to the situation. Thus, unfairness appraisals lead to a general desire for self-protection. Four experiments tested the main effect of unfairness on self-protective choices and the impact of two moderating variables: (1) awareness that unfair events happen to others and (2) the ease of recalling personally experienced unfair events. Choosing to give less to others, opting for larger assortments, preferring the utilitarian option, and choosing lower risk investments served as indicators of self-protection. Responses to unfair events were shown to differ from responses to fair, sad, and neutral events, suggesting that other appraisals do not result in the same self-protective tendencies. In Experiment 1, participants who wrote about unfair personal events were less generous than participants who wrote about fair or neutral personal events, and unfair events that happened to other people. Experiment 2 showed that writing about unfair personal events led to the selection of a larger assortment of options relative to the neutral condition. Experiment 3 found that choice of the utilitarian (vs. hedonic) options was greater for participants who recalled 1 example of a personally experienced unfair event than for those who recalled 6 unfair events or sad events. In Experiment 4, participants who were reminded that unfair events happened to other people preferred riskier investments and were more generous than neutral participants. Hence, Experiments 1, 3, and 4 demonstrated that the self-protective tendency can be weakened by directing one's attention to unfair events that happened to others or by increasing the difficulty of recalling personal unfairness experiences. The theoretical and practical implications of this research are also discussed. |
