Priming,Framing, and Position on Corporate Social Responsibility

This study tested the effects of priming, framing, and position on how participants judged a target corporation. The results suggested that the main effects of priming and framing affected participants' judgments of the target corporation's ethical CSR practices and attitudes toward the target corporation negatively. The crucial effects, however, were the interaction effects between framing and participants' positions held toward the target corporation and between priming and framing. The first of these interactions captured the degree to which the impact of framing depended on whether participants held more or less committed positions toward the target corporation. The second captured the degree to which the impact of framing depended on whether participants read the statements that explicitly primed CSR issues.