Behind Bars, Beyond Stigma: Consumer Responses to Prisoner-made Products
Prison labor is widespread, yet managers rarely disclose prisoners’ involvement in production. This reluctance is consistent with concerns about producer stigma: in a survey of managers, most expected disclosure of prison labor to harm consumer responses. Contrary to this intuition, the present research shows that consumers respond more positively to products when they learn that the products were made by prisoners. Across six experiments using laboratory and online samples, hypothetical and real prisoner-made products, and multiple comparison groups, this research finds that disclosing prisoner involvement increases product attitudes and willingness to buy. The proposed account is that consumers perceive work performed by prisoners as particularly meaningful: in the adverse context of incarceration, work is seen as providing purpose, dignity, and the potential for personal transformation. Mediation and process by moderation evidence support this account. The positive indirect effect through perceived work meaningfulness weakens when meaningfulness is independently increased by connecting the product to the producer’s identity and experiences, and it diminishes when the prisoner is described as having committed a severe crime, which constrains perceptions that work can serve as a meaningful and transformative activity. Together, these findings show that perceived work meaningfulness can counteract negative responses associated with stigmatized producers and influence how consumers evaluate the products they make.
Project-location Congruity: When Green Projects Match Green Locations
This work investigates how the perceived congruity between environmental project types and their proposed locations influences public evaluations. Drawing on schema congruity theory, the study proposes that green projects are evaluated more favorably when situated in environmentally aligned settings. Across three experimental studies using different types of green and non-green projects and various types of locations, results show that congruent project-location pairings (e.g., green projects in green areas and brownfields, or non-green projects in industrial zones) lead to more positive attitudes and higher success estimations. These findings extend the literature on perceptual congruity and environmental policy by highlighting how perceptual alignment influences laypeople’s evaluations of sustainability initiatives. Practical implications for policymakers and urban developers are also discussed.
Benign to Whom? Political Ideology and the Moral Boundaries of Humor
Benign Violation Theory proposes that humor arises when a violation is simultaneously perceived as wrong and benign. But whether a violation is benign should depend on how strongly an observer is committed to the norm being violated. The present research integrates Benign Violation Theory with Moral Foundations Theory to propose that moral commitments systematically predict the boundaries of humor. Specifically, humor appreciation should decline when a humorous stimulus violates a moral foundation to which the observer is strongly committed because the violation is less likely to be perceived as benign. Thus, commitment to care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and purity should differentially predict responses to humor that violates each corresponding foundation. Political ideology provides one systematic source of variation in these moral commitments and therefore helps predict which moral violations different consumers are likely to find humorous. This research thereby conceptualizes benignity not as a fixed property of humorous content, but as an observer-dependent judgment arising from the match between the moral norm being violated and the evaluator’s commitment to that norm.