This research examines the effects of religious belief and religious priming on negative word-of-mouth (NWOM) behavior. Drawing on social exchange and norm paradigms, we theorize and find evidence of the unique effects of religious belief and religious priming on NWOM in everyday service failure encounters. Specifically, we find that religious belief is associated with higher NWOM, driven by a greater sensitivity to violations of fairness norms, which in turn reduces forgiveness. However, exposure to religious priming attenuates NWOM among more religious consumers by reducing sensitivity to violations of fairness norms, which in turn enhances forgiveness. A field study involving over 1.2 million online reviews of actual restaurant experiences, in addition to four lab studies, provides support for our theorized effects. Our study sheds light on the religion–forgiveness discrepancy by establishing the mediating role of sensitivity to fairness violations on the relationship between religion and forgiveness in the NWOM context. Further, our results demonstrate the importance of religion as a strategic variable in the management of service failure experiences, providing theoretical implications for the literature on the effects of religion on consumer behavior.

这项研究检验了宗教信仰和宗教信仰对负面口碑（NWOM）行为的影响。利用社会交流和规范范式，我们进行了理论分析，并发现了宗教信仰和宗教信仰对NWOM在日常服务失败遭遇中的独特影响的证据。具体而言，我们发现宗教信仰与更高的NWOM相关，这是由对违反公平规范的更高敏感性引起的，反过来又减少了宽恕。但是，通过暴露于宗教信仰引发的宗教信仰降低了对违反公平规范的敏感度，从而削弱了更多宗教信仰消费者的NWOM，反过来又增强了宽恕。一项实地研究，除了四项实验室研究之外，还涉及超过120万个在线餐厅实际体验的在线评论，为我们的理论效果提供了支持。我们的研究通过在NWOM语境中建立对宗教和宽恕之间关系违反公平性的敏感性的中介作用，阐明了宗教与宽恕的差异。此外，我们的结果证明了宗教作为服务失败经验管理中的战略变量的重要性，为有关宗教对消费者行为的影响的文献提供了理论上的启示。