Corporate hypocrisy captures a consumer's belief that a firm claims to be something that it is not — the perceived gap between a company's stated corporate social responsibility (CSR) commitments and its actual behaviour. The scale was developed to explain why CSR communications can sometimes backfire: when a firm's positive CSR statements are later contradicted by reports of inconsistent behaviour, consumers form hypocrisy judgments that damage their beliefs about the firm's social responsibility and their overall attitude toward it, regardless of whether the firm's actions were positive or negative in isolation. Consistently high reliability was demonstrated across three separate experimental studies.
7-point Likert scale (1 = disagree completely, 7 = agree completely)
Full scale items shown. Always cite the original source when using this scale in research.
A firm-level, unidimensional counterpart to brand-level hypocrisy measures. The original study appendix also lists three additional reverse-coded items used for supplementary robustness checks in the original experiments; the three items presented here are the reduced, standard version that has since been adopted as the field's benchmark corporate hypocrisy measure, including direct reuse in later brand-level hypocrisy research.
Wagner, T., Lutz, R.J., & Weitz, B.A. (2009). Corporate hypocrisy: Overcoming the threat of inconsistent corporate social responsibility perceptions. Journal of Marketing, 73(6), 77–91.
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