You (Probably) Don’t Care About Child Slavery

Canada goose is one of the most popular clothing companies in the world its fashionable down jackets are loved by millions from celebs like Ryan Reynolds to politicians like Justin Trudeau its distinctive red white and blue circular logo can be seen up and down the country on cold winter days it made 730 Million last year and employs over 3,000 people it has seen unprecedented growth in the past 5 Years yet not not everybody loves Canada Goose see to create its distinctive style Canada Goose used coyote fur in the hood Peta and American Animal Rights group protested against the way Canada Goose collected this fur to get the fur Canada Goose use leg hold traps which harness onto the leg of the coyote causing excruciating pain once caught the animals suffer for days left to die from blood loss or infections some coyotes have been known to chew off their own leg to escape ape so animal rights groups protested against Canada Goose from 2010 to 2020 they protested outside of stores standing outside of Nordstrom on this Black Friday armed with posters proclaiming Canada Goose Shameless cruelty Peta also planning protests will take place at Canada Goose locations around the world trying to get the company to remove coyote fur and goose down from its jackets they occupied the inside of stores [Applause] not it's VI unsurprisingly these protests received a lot of attention with many news outlets covering the story with this attention came awareness in The Wider public which begs the question did knowing about the coyote fur collection change consumer Behavior did it put people off the brand well probably not from 2016 to 2019 when the protests were strongest Canada Goose doubled their revenue but here's the interesting thing eventually Canada Goose caved to the pressure in 2021 they announced that no more coyote fur would be used in their products so did this boost profits did it bring people back to the brand no from 2021 to 2023 revenues grew by only 6% are less than the preceding years you'd think these unethical business practices would affect consumers but in this case it didn't seem to now look maybe I'm being too simplistic there are a lot of other factors that determine revenue and maybe people just don't care about coyotes but it's not just coyotes that have suffered in building some of the world's largest companies children have suffered too a 2016 report by Amnesty International uncovered a number of cases of child labor among suppliers linked to major technology companies including Apple Samsung and Microsoft as well as several Automotive manufacturers such as Volkswagen specifically it discovered that child labor is being used in the Democratic Republic of Congo to mine calt an element that makes lithium iron batteries found in many tech devices despite these shocking findings none of these companies experienced a notable drop in sales following amnesty's report but maybe the Press wasn't sharing it enough perhaps a big Scandal would affect consumers well a bigger Scandal did affect Apple in the following year in 2017 Brian Merchant released his book The Secret history of the iPhone which revealed how Apple's suppliers at foxcon City an industrial park in China worked staff so hard that unhappy workers started killing themselves there were 18 reported suicide attempts that year and 14 confirmed deaths a BBC Panorama expose filmed secretly inside the factory exposing the brutal conditions to the millions of British people who watched on this is where your iPhone 6 comes from these are the first secret pictures from inside the factories that produce for Apple an exhausted Workforce people sleeping on their brakes others falling asleep as they work does this impact sales not really Apple sold 2117 million iPhones in 2018 and that was up 3% from previous years look I claim to care about ethics I want to be an ethical consumer yet I'm recording this very podcast on an Apple Mac laptop so are we all less ethical than we claim or are we willingly ignorant Keen to ignore the bad aspects of the brands we love today I am joined by the brilliant consumer psychologist Daniel Zayn he is assistant professor of marketing at Lehi University and has been interested in this topic of willful ignorance for almost a decade really how we got interested in this is because there was survey after survey both sort of within marketing Academia but also just at large uh in in popular press and so forth that we were seeing a disconnect and we still do between consumer stated desires to consume these ethical products even when they cost more you'll get consumers saying you know yeah I'd pay a premium to to shop ethically but then when it comes to their actual purchasing you don't see them follow through and so you see this gap between their intentions and then what they actually you know bring home now Danny doesn't base these views on gut instincts and assumptions he has researched studies that highlight how willfully ignorant customers can be I asked him to talk through these studies so I have to give a shout out to my co-author on this work uh she was sort of the one to to have the sort of seminal paper in marketing on willful ignorance that's Julie Irwin who's a researcher at the University of Oregon here in the states so she had an earlier paper prior to the work that that I became a part of demonstrating this this notion of willful ignorance and so what that means is that when consumers are in the marketplace they have a tendency to remain ignorant or not seek out information about whether our product is ethical and that's because they don't want to have to face any hard TR truths if they do go and seek that information out right it's it's the case that you know potentially that favorite pair of jeans you bought that brand was just you know implicated in a child labor Scandal you know pretty recently and so again remaining ignorant choosing not to go online not to seek this stuff out makes sense from a self- protection standpoint it allows us to continue to feel good not face these hard truths um interestingly in that work they also showed that if consumers are presented readily with this information so if you can't remain ignorant if you can't avoid it you will tend to use it we see consumers tend to use it in their shopping decisions and so now because it's there it's not something you can ignore you know you'll integrate it into your purchase decisions maybe it sways you towards a different brand than you you know would have chosen had you not had that information people willingly ignore unethical news about the brands they like but if they are presented with information about unethical practices at the point of purchase they do use that information and change their purchase decision it's easy to ignore unsustainable farming practices when you're chomping down on your burger at your favorite fast food joint that is what most of us do but if there is a big sign telling you how unsustainable your Whopper is it does influence people to perhaps pick the fish filet and so that's sort of the fundamental notion of willful ignorance is sort of actively or willfully ignoring information about the ethicality of products so you don't have to face the uncomfortable you know any any uncomfortable hard truths that would come about um that of course wouldn't feel good for us my work subsequently Builds on that so we extend this original finding he wanted to see if consumers weren't just ignoring unethical news but if they were actively forgetting it more than the equivalent positive information our hypothesis here was that consumers might actually sort of employ uh a motivated memory strategy where they sort of actively forget negative ethical information about products and the way Dany tested this hypothesis was pretty smart we basically presented participants with information about say six different products we vary different attributes of these products so for example you know maybe one attribute was price uh in the case you know that we were using genes maybe one was the color of the genes and so forth um one of the attributes that we made these Brands differ on was an ethical one and so again whether the products were made with sustainable materials or not maybe whether they were made with child labor or not and so essentially again we'd lay out information about six different brands across several different attributes each one of these being an ethical attribute and we basically just had participants review this information we told them we were going to ask them about it again later and so we're essentially trying to have them commit this information about these different brands to their memory uh and of course on that ethical attribute some Brands we painted in a positive light and so yeah this this brand of jeans is made in an ethical fashion with sustainable material or you know with Fair Labor for other of those Brands listed uh it was a negative Val on that ethical attribute and so now maybe not made sustainably made perhaps with child labor and so again participants took some time to review this information about these different brands and then we asked them to basically recall this information later on after doing different filler tasks and so forth to allow that to sort of settle into their memory to see what happened at a later time we would then call them back and ask them to recall the information about these Brands and see what happened so just to recap 236 students are asked to read and memorize the descriptions of different products and these descriptions included six attributes stuff like quality price but also an ethical Dimension like if it was made with child labor or came from a sustainable Source do people remember the unethical stuff or do they forget after reading the descriptions Danny made the participants spend 20 minutes on a different task to try and distract them and then invited them back to see what they remembered here is what he found when we did indeed call him back in general what we found was that consumers were worse at remembering bad ethical information about a product such as that it was produced with child labor or maybe in a polluting manner then they were at remembering good ethical information such as when one of those Brands was made with Fair Labor practices or without much pollution and getting into the weeds here a little but we found this for both recall and recognition so recall is when we asked you to populate that information without any external prompt to help you so just gave you the brand name and basically said write everything you can remember we also saw it with recognition where we actually presented the information back to participants in sort of a multiple choice fashion and said hey choose you know what was the information about the ethicality of this product and within this basically multiple choice quiz participants could choose the correct answer whether it was made sustainably or not those would both be options and what we see is across either of the ways that we assess people's memory they either sort of just forget alog together they don't write anything about the ethicality of these Brands they just sort of have put it out of their mind altogether or what they tend to do is also Mis remember the negative ethical information as positive so they're actually saying oh this brand that they read about that was actually you know using child labor they remember perhaps dishearteningly as using Fair Labor when we assess their memory down the line this shouldn't happen there is nothing less memorable or less Salient about using child labor versus say using local workers yet consumer's memory for unethical attributes was worse and not by a little bit by the way the drop off in Recoil was huge in one study where we were looking at desks and so the ethical attribute that we varied was whether they were made with Tree Farm sustainable Tree Farm wood like a a tree farm that's you know replenishable in a sense versus exotic rainforest wood which clearly is not sustainable um in terms of memory for the sustainable Tree Farm wood there were 60% of responses correct when it came to not sustainable rainforest wood as an attribute only 45% responses were correct so you see like a 15% drop there but in general in other studies we see like over a 20% drop again according to the measure that we created which I I won't necessarily get into the woods about um but it's pretty sizable consumers were 15% less likely to remember that the wood used in a desk came from an endangered rainforest rather than sustainable tree farms a second study involved a national sample of 402 people here the participants were asked to put together an outfit that included a pair of jeans about half the participants saw a brand of jeans that was described as being made with child labor while the other half saw a brand of jeans that was described as being made ethically with no child labor the results was similar to the first study people who saw the genes made with child labor were much less likely to remember this information than people who saw a brand of jeans made with adult labor and Danny's found that this process of forgetting unethical information isn't even seen as Wrong by customers what's fascinating is that we also ran a study just to ask people's perceptions of somebody who does employ this willfully ignorant memory and what we found is that somebody who employs willfully ignorant memory that is incorrectly remembers information about the the negative ethical ethicality of a product that's actually seen as less morally wrong than correctly remembering the information but ignoring it so of course the brain's going to employ this right if it's sort of seen as the less morally wrong thing to do by forgetting it well it seems like you know why wouldn't the brain be wired to do that the brain's going to try to help us feel as good as we can about ourselves so what's the solution for companies out there trying to sell ethical products what should you do for major companies looking to shift the ethical practices how do you persuade consumers well Danny has got a suggestion well the most simple sort of solution that we could think of is if this is something that you care about as a company and a marketer and you again actually have the operations to back it is provide all of that information upfront to Consumers constantly remind them of it so that they don't have to rely on their memory put it on your website put it in store put it on packaging you know as as much as you can get that in front of consumer's eyes at all points of this customer decision Journey well then they don't have to rely on their memory they don't have the chance to forget it or misremember it um in any way and so that would be the sort of simplest Solution by reminding consumers about the ethical attributes of the product customers will be more likely to remember those attributes and interestingly the ethical businesses will probably receive higher revenues in doing so in December 2022 researchers Troy Duan and Das analyzed over 10 million transactions at a US grocery store they found that products with sustainability messages had 6.4% higher revenues than products without them so volvic proudly claiming that their water bottle is from recycled plastic boosted their sales by 6.4% compared to the equivalent brand who doesn't make a sustainability claim but that is only because consumers saw this on the grocery store website at the point of purchase like Danny says we can't rely on our memories we have to show these ethical practices at the point of sale but that is not all Danny has found in researching ethical shopping he has discovered something else which I found honestly shocking so he's also looked at how we change our views of others once we know they've made an ethical purchase so if my best mate buys a sustainable pair of jeans my view of him will change and Dany says it won't change for the better here's Danny to explain so again I've already explained this notion of willful ignorance and so essentially in this paper what we wanted to say is well when you as a consumer are willfully ignorant when you've chosen to sort of acly actively ignore ethical information when choosing across Brands let's say and you make your purchase well what happens if you then learn about another consumer who sought out that ethical information when making a similar purchase and so this other consumer we'll call an ethical other because at least relative to you and your willful ignorance they appear more ethical and so in a social marketplace right where we can go on to any social media site and see people posting about hey just bought these awesome ethical genes from so and so well if you you know just recently bought a pair of genes yourself and I know I keep using jeans but if if you B just bought a pair of jeans yourself and didn't consider you know the labor practices or the sustainability of the material well what's going to unfold now and so that's essentially what we're interested in looking at is sort of the social implications of willful ignorance and so in order to test this basically we first made participants demonstrate their willful ignorance when making a hypothetical purchase this is pretty easy to do um so you present several different products that again differ on on several attributes one of those attributes is around the the ethics and so maybe again some of the brands you say will be made with child labor while others will be made Fairly but then what you do is tell participants that they can only choose to view information about two out of the four attributes to help make their decision and so basically they have to choose to forego seeing any information about two out of the four whereas they'll readily be able to view information about the other two out of the four and in the spirit of wil ignorance the majority of participants choose to remain willfully ignorant of that ethical attribute so that's one that they choose to not look at uh again they'll choose something like you know maybe price and and warranty length whatever it might be in order to help make their decision and so now that we've induced participants to be willfully ignorant which isn't that hard to do unfortunately we then painted a picture of somebody else who actually chose to view the ethical attribute information as one of the two so he said okay consider somebody else who chose again along the lines of of ethical information at least for one of the two and then we ask participants to Simply rate this person rate them on things like how attractive they are how intelligent they are uh and just various traits you could think of that you know we commonly probably assess people on and what we found is that when these willfully ignorant participants were raiding these ethical others this individual who actively sought out this ethical information the participants were calling these people things like stupid unintelligent uh unsexy was a trait rating that came up so it's pretty Bing like they just really sort of went to town on these ethical others which again is not great if I choose to ignore the ethical descriptions of products but I hear that my colleague Jeremy has read those ethical descriptions my view of Jeremy will worsen I'll think he's making poor decisions I'll criticize his choices I'll even say he looks less attractive and remember this isn't amongst people who are oil loving Enron shareholders who don't mind a bit of child labor no this is amongst normal people in the general public so why does this happen I asked Dy so we're social creatures through and through um and so when we constantly compare ourselves to other people when we compare ourselves and again it's all about protecting the self if you compare yourself to somebody who appears more ethical than you that's not going to feel great it's going to make you feel like you're you're perhaps less than them and at least in this this domain and so there's one of two roots that could happen here right you could imagine sort of that other that ethical other uplifting you and sort of getting you on the train and next time you'll go and and seek this ethical information yourself sort of being inspired by them we don't see that happen instead what we see is this denigration where again you feel threatened and so the way that you cope with it is by calling them names and rating them negatively and then what's fascinating is that the story doesn't end there so because you view yourself as this willfully ignorant consumer if you view yourself denigrating ethical others well now you conclude hey I see myself putting down this person who cares about child labor and what you conclude about yourself is oh I must not care about child labor that much because I'm putting down this person who does and so what we actually see is that there's this Snowball Effect where not only did you denigrate this ethical other but it actually LED you to feel less anger towards that underlying issue of child labor and now in the future we see participants less likely to act in any beneficial way towards sort of advancing child labor initiatives and so it's sort of a triple whammy in my mind like first you were willfully ignorant yourself you chose to ignore ethical information when navigating in the marketplace then second you're putting down people who actively seek got this information and actually are presumably trying to do the right thing and then third because of you putting them down what you conclude is you must not care about the issue that they do and you're less likely to run with it in the future so it's sort of a disheartening spiraling effect if you put it all together this is a little worrying right the global temperature is projected to increase by 1.5° C within the next 30 years and that is estimated to have devastating impacts on the environment glacial loss will reach 80% sea levels Will Rise by 0.3 M and $16 billion of coastal property will be below sea level and London will be projected to be 6° hotter this is a time when we should celebrate ethical sustainable decisions of others yet Dany shows that the opposite happens so I wondered is there an antidote is there a way to stop people from denigrating ethical others we think there is we think if requires a little bit of savviness but you know I'll put it on maybe like a a oneto one level where if let's say you don't eat meat and you invite a fellow meat eater over to your house uh well if you're cooking dinner for them you know what you shouldn't do is plop down this vegetarian or vegan dish in front of them and start you know spouting why it's better for the environment and so on and so forth you're likely going to catch Flack there right this meat eater is going to probably not respond too favorably to you in that sense but if you put that dish down in front of them right and just sit down and first actually Bond over how enjoyable it is how delicious like actually talk about you know the The Culinary aspect behind it and try to get on Common Ground that way maybe then you can you know carefully navigate into a conversation you know about this underlying ethical component uh but you definitely don't want to come out of the gate heavy hitting right on this notion of ethicality uh it's probably going to you know lead you to catch some flak because that other part is going to feel threatened and according to our research to respond to that threat they're going to denigrate you distance themselves from you and so forth at the start of the show I talked about some of the unethical business practices of Canada Goose sharing how their treatment of coyotes was considered inhumane for listeners who own a Canada Goose jacket who like the brand and who have spent hundreds of pounds to wear it listening to me criticize the brand would have been difficult to hear many fans of the brand would have felt angry hearing me highlight these things many might have actively ignored skipping ahead or perhaps turning the episode off and worse those who did tune out would have been more cemented in their belief that this animal cruelty isn't as big of a deal as I made out like Danny says it's difficult to change opinions by highlighting the differences in our points of view If instead I'd said how wonderful Canada goose is as a brand and how they have pioneered a new era of ethical fashion by removing all the coyote fur from their products that would have been more effective it could have stopped those people from tuning out and perhaps even made them agree that animal cruelty is wrong and made them certain that they are delighted with Canada Goose for doing something about about it changing someone's mind is tough we throw up defenses when someone challenges us we selectively ignore information about unethical practices if it goes against our intended behaviors like like desperately wanting to buy the latest iPhone yet there are some ways around these human Tendencies highlighting your products ethical attributes at the point of sale forces customers to remember them creating an ethical product and showcasing it also seems to boost sales and finding common ground with an ideological opponent makes them far more likely to change their beliefs and agree so before you lament your elderly relatives for their backwards views during a family reunion try to highlight all the things you have in common first

Channel: Nudge Podcast

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Length: 27min 47sec (1667 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 04 2024