Anxious Altruism: Virtue Signaling Mediates the Impact of Attachment Style on Consumers’ Green Purchase Behavior and Prosocial Responses

Muhammad Junaid Shahid Hasni (), Faruk Anıl Konuk () and Tobias Otterbring ()
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Muhammad Junaid Shahid Hasni: University of Trento
Faruk Anıl Konuk: Sakarya University
Tobias Otterbring: University of Agder

Journal of Business Ethics, 2025, vol. 196, issue 3, No 8, 603-637

Abstract: Abstract Virtue signaling serves to express moral and ethical values publicly, showcasing commitment to social and sustainable ideals. This research, conducted with non-WEIRD samples to mitigate the prevalent WEIRD bias (i.e., the tendency to solely rely on samples from Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic societies), examines whether the scarcely studied virtue-signaling construct mediates the influence of consumers’ attachment anxiety (vs. avoidance) on their green purchase behavior and prosocial responses. Drawing on attachment theory and the emerging virtue-signaling literature, the current work reports the results from three studies (Ntotal = 898) in which consumers’ attachment patterns were not only measured, as in most prior related research, but also manipulated. Study 1 confirmed the unique ability of measured attachment anxiety, but not attachment avoidance, to predict consumers’ green purchase behavior and prosocial tendencies, with virtue signaling mediating these links. Study 2 manipulated participants’ attachment patterns, finding further support for the mediating role of virtue signaling between attachment anxiety (vs. avoidance) and these dependent variables. Study 3 provided a more nuanced account for our virtue-signaling conceptualization by documenting that self-oriented, but not other-oriented, virtue signaling mediated the link between attachment anxiety and both our key outcomes in public contexts. From a managerial viewpoint, these findings indicate that anxiously attached consumers constitute a potentially lucrative segment for companies seeking to expand their market share of sustainable and ethically produced products.

Keywords: Attachment style; Attachment anxiety; Attachment avoidance; Virtue signaling; Self-oriented virtue signaling; Green consumption; Green purchase behavior; Prosocial behavior (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1007/s10551-024-05734-8

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