Familiar Strangers: The Role of Social Context in Consumer Reparatory Behavior

Consumers often act to correct the wrongdoings of people who are close to them such as a family member or a friend. In this paper, we demonstrate across seven experiments that consumers engage in a variety of reparatory behaviors—from a simple apology to gift-giving and taking on a purchase—even when the wrongdoer is a complete stranger. The desire to correct the wrongdoings of a stranger occurs situationally: when the social context in which a wrongdoing occurs highlights a shared feature between the wrongdoer and bystander, a temporary sense of closeness is formed between actors. We further document that under these conditions, bystanders experience greater vicarious embarrassment for the transgressor’s actions, leading to costly reparatory consumption behaviors. We identify important boundary conditions for our effect: when the transgression is not observed by others, bystanders do not experience embarrassment and are less likely to repair the actions of the transgressor. Further, our effects are driven by the shared identity of the bystander and transgressor and not the identity of the victim. We also demonstrate with a behavioral measure of consumption that consumers can be motivated to engage in reparatory consumption even when they are not physically proximal to the transgressor.