54 The Urge to Splurge was theoretically trained, 34.5% was practically trained, 34.7% only finished high school, and 1.7% did not have a diploma). Stimulus material & procedure. In Experiment 2, the same message frames (stimulus material) as in Experiment 1 were used, except that a neutral message frame was added as the third condition. The neutral framed advertisement was identical to the other two advertisements, except that it did not contain any benefits of buying the cookies for anyone. Experiment 2 was a vignette-based experiment; therefore, the participants were exposed to the advertisement online. They were first asked to imagine being in a physical supermarket doing groceries for dinner and seeing an advertisement at the checkout register. The participants were then randomly exposed to either the self-benefit message, other-benefit message, or neutral message. Thereafter, they completed the questionnaire. Measurements. In Experiment 2, both types of justifications—moral and deservingness—, were measured using a 7-point Likert scale. Each scale consisted of two items that were derived from the most frequently cited answers to the open-ended questions in Experiment 1 (cf. Mukhopadhyay & Johar, 2009; Taylor, Webb, & Sheeran, 2014). Moral justification was operationalized as moral or pro-social reasons that people could use to justify impulse buying and was measured with the items “I think this company is a beautiful initiative” and “I think this company is congenial” (explained variance = 91.15%, Cronbach’s alpha = .90, M = 4.3, SD = 1.6). Deservingness justification was operationalized as reasons that people could use to justify why they deserve to buy impulsively and was measured with the items “I allowiv myself to these cookies” and “I feel like I deserve these cookies” (explained variance = 91.95%, Cronbach’s alpha = .91, M = 3.4, SD = 1.8). Impulse buying urge was, similarly as in Experiment 1, measured with items based on the measurement used by Sultan, Joireman, and Sprott (2012, explained variance = 88.38%, Cronbach’s alpha = .93, M = 3.3, SD = 1.8). Impulse buying behavior was measured by asking the participants to either choose to receive points for their participation in the study (which they normally also receive when participating in studies and can be exchanged for money) or choose to buy the cookies with the points they otherwise would earn. In the latter case, participants would receive cookies and no points. As Experiment 2 was vignette-based and the participants were unaware of the topic of this study prior to participation, we can assume that choosing the cookies over the points would be an unintended and immediate reaction to the stimulus, which corresponds to the concept of impulse behavior (Muruganantham & Bhakat, 2013). To confirm that the effect of message framing on impulse buying is explained by justification, and thus by a reason that justifies one’s impulse buying behavior (Holland et al., 2002), we added a one-item question about why people are willing to buy the cookies (ranging from 1 = only to benefit myself to 7 = only to benefit others, M = 3.5, SD = 1.9). We also measured two control variables: the extent to which people like cookies in general (M = 5.3, SD = 1.6) and the extent to which people prohibit themselves from eating cookies (M = 4.7, SD = 1.8). Both were evenly divided across the three conditions and were therefore not included as co-
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