Ludovica Cesareo on Moral Disengagement and Counterfeit Luxury Goods

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In this episode of Lehigh University’s College of Business ilLUminate podcast, we're talking with Ludovica Cesareo about her recent study published by the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research titled Knowledge, Morality, and the Appeal of Counterfeit Luxury Goods.

Cesareo is an assistant professor of marketing in Lehigh's College of Business and is an expert in consumer behavior with luxury and counterfeit luxury goods, ethical decision-making, aesthetics, and emotions.

The study was co-authored by Silvia Bellezza, associate professor of business in marketing at Columbia Business School.

Cesareo spoke with Jack Croft, host of the ilLUminate podcast. Listen to the podcast here and subscribe and download Lehigh Business on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Below is an edited excerpt from that conversation. Read the complete podcast transcript [PDF]. 

Jack Croft: It'd probably be helpful first to delve into this construct of moral disengagement. It's not a term I [was] familiar with before reading your study. So what is it and how and why do people morally disengage from what would be considered immoral behavior?

Ludovica Cesareo: I think even though you may have not been aware of the term, I'm sure everybody has engaged in moral disengagement before. It was first theorized by Albert Bandura, who was a psychologist back in 1991 as part of social cognitive theory. And so moral disengagement is this psychological process that allows individuals to behave in a way that they know is morally wrong. 

So moral disengagement is a way to redefine, justify or excuse immoral behavior to make it appear more ethical and acceptable. And Bandura theorizes that there's different ways in which consumers can morally disengage. And for the sake of our chat and the research that I carried out on counterfeit goods, there's really three different paths that consumers can morally disengage when it comes to counterfeit. 

The first one is moral justification. So you justify your purchase of counterfeits, for example, due to a situational factor or because you are unable to afford the real thing. The second process is called diffusion of responsibility. If you believe that counterfeiting is socially acceptable, you say, "Well, everybody buys counterfeits," then that leads consumers to have more positive responses to counterfeits and like them and purchase them more. 

And then the third process is called distortion of the consequences. You justify purchasing a counterfeit now with the intent to purchase an original in the future, or you just ignore the negative effects of counterfeiting on original brands.

Croft: I think that leads us to the other key terms here where you talk about knowledge, both subjective and objective, within the context of how knowledgeable consumers actually are about a certain product category, such as, in this case, luxury goods. How do you define those terms? And I'm also curious, how do you measure that knowledge? Because it would seem that could be a bit tricky.

Cesareo: Knowledge in a field of consumption is the amount of domain-specific information that the consumer acquires through learning and involvement. And there's two types of knowledge. Subjective knowledge is the perception of what a consumer knows about the consumption domain. So it's essentially what I think I know about this product domain, and this one is easier to measure because it's through self-reports. You can ask consumers, how knowledgeable do you think you are? And it's a pretty straightforward way of measuring their perception of how knowledgeable they are. 

The other type of knowledge is what we call objective knowledge, which is what consumers actually know about a product category or domain, and it's stored in memory. And this is harder to measure because we measure it through what we would call objective tests. These tests need to be, sorry for the repetition, but tested, to make sure that they're valid, that they are actually measuring what they think they're measuring. And so objective tests measure what consumers actually know about a domain.

Croft: Let's get to the overarching finding. You did four studies that you conducted as part of this that examined how receptive consumers with the high or low-knowledge of luxury goods would be toward fake products, how positively or negatively they felt about those products. What did you find overall, kind of the totality of the four studies?

Cesareo: The big takeaway is that low-knowledge consumers, those who don't know a lot or don't think they know a lot about fashion and luxury goods, like counterfeit more than high-knowledge consumers, and the reason is because they are more likely to morally disengage. So they are less likely to view counterfeits through a moral lens, and thus they have these more favorable predispositions towards counterfeits. 

Croft: Are there takeaways for consumers who either may not have given a lot of thought to the issues involved in buying counterfeit luxury products or even have thought about it and just decided, "Well, everybody does it and I can't afford the real thing, so," or whatever the reason is, but I'm going to go ahead and buy it. 

And this time of year, the main question, is that going to land them on Santa's naughty list?

Cesareo: [laughter] So I think, as Socrates famously said, "I know that I know nothing." I think that's true for all consumers, not just with counterfeits, but when purchasing products in general. I think as consumers, we need to be a little more critical of our belief and our knowledge about the products and the brands that we buy and just be curious and eager to learn more. 

In the domain of counterfeits, I definitely think that consumers need to think more about their actions and how there are real consequences. It may not be to them immediately, but it is for businesses, for society in general. I think definitely, like you were saying, buying counterfeit goods will land you on Santa's naughty list. And so I would highly caution consumers to think twice next time before buying counterfeit goods.