(Illustration by Adam McCauley)
Most US states forbid low-income families from buying organic foods with benefits provided by WIC (the Special Supplemental Nutrition program for Women, Infants, and Children). Similarly, a bill proposed in the New York State Legislature would bar participants in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) from purchasing so-called luxury food items. (WIC and SNAP are federal programs, but individual states set guidelines for administering them.) Such policies stem from deep-rooted attitudes that are common among the general public, according to a team of researchers led by Jenny Olson, assistant professor of marketing at the University of Kansas School of Business. “We already know that low-income consumers who receive government assistance have financial constraints,” Olson says. “But our research highlights the cultural constraints on these consumers [when they] make choices that arguably are good for society.”
Olson and her colleagues set out to learn how people judge the purchase of “ethical” goods, such as hybrid cars and organic food, by consumers who receive government assistance. The research team conducted five experiments in which groups of participants (who were either undergraduate students or adults recruited via Amazon Mechanical Turk) responded to scenarios that involved various consumer decisions.
In one experiment, participants responded to a grocery list that was attributed either to a shopper who was on welfare or to a shopper who earned $85,000 per year. In addition, the list either did or did not include certain organic items (milk, cereal, and carrots). The key finding was that participants rated an $85,000-peryear consumer who bought organic items high on a “morality index,” whereas they gave a low morality rating to a welfare-receiving consumer who bought the same set of organic items.
Whether people view ethical consumer choices as “moral” or “immoral” depends on their perception of a consumer’s “deservingness,” according to Olson and her colleagues. The results of several experiments revealed a common attitude among participants: People who receive taxpayer-funded benefits don’t deserve to make expensive purchases, even if those purchases are ethical. Olson characterizes that attitude in this way: Welfare recipients “don’t have a right to spend on positive-for-society things, because they haven’t earned the money to do so.”
Participants were less apt to disapprove of ethical buying choices by low-income consumers who are not on public assistance. “The same ethical behavior can be seen differently as a function of who is doing it,” Olson explains. “Buying organic food or fair trade cotton or cruelty-free cosmetics: All of these things are ethical, but they are seen as acceptable purchases only for some consumers.”
People appear to apply similar judgments to organizations as well. In one experiment, Olson and her colleagues gave participants $12 in cash and asked them to consider donating all or part of that sum to a fictitious food bank. Some participants were told that the food bank provided organic items; others were told that it provided standard food items. The researchers found that participants donated less money to the food bank in the first scenario (the organization that offered organic food) than in the second scenario (the organization that did not offer organic food). “Nonprofit organizations that try to go ‘above and beyond’ actually receive a backlash [from donors], because they provide organic food,” Olson says.
The idea that poor people don’t deserve to buy high-priced goods is pervasive, says Amanda Freeman, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Hartford. In her research on low-income families, she too has found that people in all income groups tend to hold this view. In the low-income communities that she has studied, residents who don’t receive welfare benefits often distance themselves from their neighbors who do. “People think that if you’re poor, you should be trying to ‘dig yourself out of this hole,’” Freeman says. “Yet you can certainly work at Walmart and [still] qualify for SNAP benefits. The proportion of people cheating the welfare system is much smaller than the proportion of people cheating on their taxes.”
Freeman and Olson both applaud the trend in which some grocery stores—Trader Joe’s, for example—have begun to carry low-cost organic brands. Making such products more affordable and easier to access, these scholars suggest, will help change the perception that they are “luxury” goods. “Anything that can minimize the cost element will be key to allowing broader adoption of these products by different groups of consumers,” Olson suggests.
Jenny G. Olson, Brent McFerran, Andrea C. Morales, and Darren W. Dahl, “Wealth and Welfare: Divergent Moral Reactions to Ethical Consumer Choices,” Journal of Consumer Research, 42, 2016.
Read more stories by Corey Binns.