Pathways for avoiding self-sanction: How consumers give themselves a PASS on virtue violations

Abstract

Despite motivations to see themselves as virtuous, consumers commonly engage in behaviors that are bad for themselves or others, such as eating unhealthy food or refusing prosocial requests. I introduce the Pathways for Avoiding Self-Sanction (PASS) model, which explains how consumers violate their standards for virtue without self-sanction. This model posits that consumers have a subjective threshold that they must not cross lest they incur self-sanction and outlines three main pathways through which consumers succumb to the temptation of bad behaviors without crossing this threshold: the self-based path, the behavior-based path, or the threshold-based path. By drawing on shared psychological processes between self-control and moral decision-making, the PASS model organizes self-sanction avoidance strategies across literature in marketing, psychology, organizational behavior, and behavioral economics, offering a comprehensive and parsimonious view of the mechanisms through which consumers engage in maladaptive behaviors that harm themselves, others, and society.