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Engaging through stories: Effects of narratives on individuals’ skepticism toward corporate social responsibility efforts

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Highlights

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    CSR communication through narratives is effective in reducing CSR skepticism.

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    Narratives increased participants’ engagement with the video message.

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    Narratives affected almost all of the previously identified dimensions of CSR skepticism.

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    Skepticism toward CSR outcomes and management constitute a great deal of CSR skepticism.

Abstract

Skepticism is prevalent surrounding companies’ corporate social responsibility (CSR) communication. Existing research suggests that narratives can reduce counterarguing and increase story-consistent beliefs and attitudes. However, research is still in its preliminary stage in understanding how narratives may help alleviate individuals’ skepticism toward companies’ CSR initiatives. Through an experiment with Amazon Mechanical Turk participants (n = 345), the current study tested the effect of narrative vs non-narrative videos on individual perception of CSR skepticism. YouTube videos depicting a real organization’s CSR initiatives on the issue of gender equality were selected as stimuli. Results of the study suggest that narrative significantly reduced almost all of the previously identified dimensions of CSR skepticism and significantly increased perceived intrinsic (altruistic) motives. Furthermore, engagement with the video message and perceived CSR motives were significant mediators. The study highlights engagement with messages as a key aspect of reducing CSR skepticism. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Introduction

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has become an active research area in public relations. CSR is understood as “the voluntary actions that a corporation implements as it pursues its mission and fulfills its perceived obligations to stakeholders, including employees, communities, the environment, and society as a whole” (Coombs & Holladay, 2012, p. 8). Despite 86 % of Americans expect companies to engage in solving social and environmental issues (Cone Communications, 2017), they remain skeptical about various aspects of CSR efforts including companies’ motives, their effectiveness, and their actual impact on society (Morsing, Schultz, & Nielsen, 2008). This paradox is called a Catch-22 challenge. Companies are expected to conduct CSR, but publicizing their efforts may also increase consumers’ CSR skepticism (Morsing et al., 2008).

Recently, Coombs (2019) noted that the use of stories or narratives may help improve the perception of CSR and overcome the Catch-22 challenges. Existing research on persuasive effects of narratives suggests that narratives help to reduce counterarguing (e.g. Moyer-Gusé & Nabi, 2010); increase story-consistent beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors (van Laer & de Ruyter, 2010); and promote comprehension of the information (Barbour, Doshi, & Hernández, 2016). The persuasive effects of narratives, however, also depend on a “story genre”. Clementson (2020), for example, found that non-narratives were actually preferred in a crisis situation. Research is still in its preliminary stage in understanding how narratives may help alleviate individuals’ skepticism toward companies’ CSR initiatives. Only a handful of researchers qualitatively explored narrative approaches to CSR communication (e.g., Coombs, 2019; Humphreys & Brown, 2008), and even fewer have tested the effect of narratives on skepticism (Dhanesh & Nekmat, 2019).

To that end, this study aims to understand whether narratives are effective to reduce CSR skepticism. Specifically, after reviewing the literature on narrative research and dimensions of skepticism, the study proposes several hypotheses and research questions concerning how narratives may affect individuals’ perception of narrative messages and their skepticism towards companies’ CSR efforts. Insights from the current study provide much-needed evidence on the role of narrative engagement in individuals’ understandings and perceptions of organizations’ CSR for researchers and communication practitioners.

Section snippets

Literature review

Storytelling is not a new idea in public relations (e.g. Heath et al., 1992), and current public relations research has shown significant interests in how storytelling may affect publics’ perceptions of messages (Clementson, 2020; Coombs & Holladay, 2018; Kent, 2015). Narratives also fit neatly into the emerging perspective on public relations engagement and co-creation of meaning (e.g. Botan & Taylor, 2004; Dhanesh, 2017; Jelen-Sanchez, 2017; Johnston, 2014; Kang, 2014; Men & Tsai, 2014). Yet,

Method

To answer the research questions and test the hypotheses, an online survey experiment was implemented. The experiment tested whether CSR messages in a narrative format versus messages in a non-narrative format had significant effects on outcome variables. We first conducted a pilot study to test the experimental stimuli, then we conducted the main study based on a sample from the Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk).

Effects of narrative on CSR skepticism and message engagement

An ANOVA test showed that narrative videos significantly reduced CSR skepticism, F(1, 343) = 10.24, p = .002, R2 = .030, Mnon-narrative = 3.76, Mnarrative = 3.29, supporting H1a. In addition, narrative videos also significantly increased message engagement, F(1, 343) = 9.93, p = .002, R2 = .028, Mnon-narrative = 4.63, Mnarrative = 4.94. H1b was supported.

Mediating effect of message engagement on skepticism

To test whether message engagement was a mediator in reducing CSR skepticism, we utilized the PROCESS macro in SPSS (Hayes, 2013). The PROCESS

Implications

The current study provides much-needed insights on how narrative-based CSR communication affects individuals’ perception of organizations’ CSR efforts, particularly regarding their skepticism. Skepticism is prevalent in consumers and publics’ perception of myriad social responsibility initiatives implemented by companies (Forehand & Grier, 2003; Rim & Kim, 2016). Situated at the intersection of narrative theory, the rising engagement perspective in public relations research, and CSR skepticism,

Practical implications

The study tests the effects of narratives on CSR skepticism based on messages created by an actual company, thus increasing the external validity of the experiment and highlighting important practical implications of the results. First, videos using narratives consistently outperformed non-narrative videos on all CSR dimensions in this study, vouching for the value of storytelling and narratives in CSR communication. Simply put, narratives work in reducing message receivers’ skepticism toward a

Limitations and directions for future research

Although the findings of the study provide useful insights to understanding CSR skepticism and how practitioners need to communicate about their CSR efforts, the study has several limitations. First, the study relied on testing the messages of only one company in the banking industry. Previous research has established that consumers consider industry norms when evaluating CSR (Leonidou & Skarmeas, 2017). Future research can validate the study results by testing companies in other

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors report no declarations of interest.

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