51 Chapter 3 Stimulus material & procedure. The participants were exposed to an advertisement of a sustainability-driven company. The company sells cookies that are baked by young adults with a distance to the labor market. Cookies are a hedonic product and, therefore, an interesting product to study in this paper, as it is generally harder and more necessary to justify impulsively purchasing such goods than the purchase of utilitarian goods (Okada, 2005; Londoño & Ruiz de Maya, 2022). The advertisement contained a photo of a baker lifting a tray of cookies combined with a photo of different kind of packaged cookies and the following sentence: “Our cookies are fresh, handmade, and come in a variety of flavors”. To manipulate the message frame, we followed White and Peloza (2009) and implemented either two self-benefits (“Treat yourself to some extra happiness today and buy our cookies”; “You deserve it, right?”) or two other-benefits (“Treat the underprivileged young adults who bake these cookies to some extra happiness today and buy our cookies”; “They deserve it, right?”). We conducted a pre-test to check whether the manipulation of the message frame succeeded. Forty-nine undergraduate students participated in a within-subject pre-test and were asked to specify, on a scale from 1 (self) to 10 (others), the extent to which they thought the advertisements focused on them versus others. The results demonstrated that the other-benefit message frame was indeed experienced as more focused on others, and the self-benefit message frame was more focused on themselves (Mothers = 7.57, SD = 1. 71 versus Mself = 3.48, SD = 2.61, p = .000). The advertisement (stimulus material) was placed in the window of the supermarket that sold the cookies. Passers-by were asked by student assistants to first look at the advertisement and then complete the questionnaire. The participants’ exposure to the self-benefit or other-benefit framed message depended on the day they were asked to participate in the study. The conditions were altered per day and per week to counterbalance the possible effect of “day of the week.” Measurements. To obtain the first idea of the justification processes at work, we asked participants, with open-ended questions, what their thoughts and feelings were during exposure to the message. These answers were coded independently by two researchers following a coding scheme, which determined whether the reported thoughts and feelings could be categorized as a justification or not. As the intercoder reliability was very high (Kappa = .906, O’Conner & Joffe, 2020), we decided to follow the judgements of the first author on the few different encodings that were found after discussing the differences together (cf. O’Conner & Joffe, 2020). In the coding scheme, a distinction was made between moral justification, comprising all of the answers that people could use as moral or pro-social reasons to justify their impulse purchase urges (e.g., “It is a wonderful initiative and I would like to support that,” based on the definition used by Haidt, 2003; Taylor, Webb & Sheeran, 2014; Niven & Healy, 2016), and deservingness justification, encompassing all of the answers that people could use as a justification of why they deserve to impulsively buy (e.g., “I worked really hard today and feel like I deserve a treat,” based on the definition used by Kivetz & Simonson, 2002; Mukhopadhyay & Johar, 2009; Effron et al., 2013). Impulse buying urge was measured with three items (e.g., “I feel a strong urge to buy the cookies,” explained variance = 88.38%, Cronbach’s alpha = .93,
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