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This study aims to examine the effects of the perceived warmth and competence of humanoid robots on customer tolerance of service failure through the affective response and the boundary condition of relationship norms.

Two experimental studies were conducted to investigate the effects of perceived warmth and competence of humanoid robots’ physical appearances on tolerance of service failure and the mediating role of anger. The boundary influence of relationship norms is also explored.

The results reveal that the perception of warmth (vs. competence) robot leads to less (more) anger, which significantly results in tolerance of service failure. However, customer tolerance is insignificant under exchange norms, as the undelivered service violates the expectations of both warm and competent robots.

This study provides practical guidance for hospitality managers to implement humanoid robots in a way that minimizes the negative outcomes of service failure. Managers should also think about the appropriate match of different types of humanoid robots and relationship norms in which robots will be deployed.

This study contributes to the tolerance literature by taking a social cognition perspective to investigate the effect of humanoid robots’ physical appearances on customers’ reactions to service failure. The findings also reveal that its affective mechanism lies in the effect of expectancy violations of service failure on tolerance. Furthermore, this study extends the literature on relationship norms to the influence of company factors on effective humanoid robot implementation.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the interaction effect of moral identity and construal level on consumer green consumption and the mediating role of pro-environmental self-accountability.

The authors examined the hypotheses in two experiment studies. In study 1, the authors measured participants’ chronic individual difference of moral identity and primed construal level. In study 2, the authors primed moral identity and measured chronic individual difference of construal level. The authors also measured pro-environmental self-accountability in these two studies.

The results reveal that construal level moderates the relationship between moral identity and consumer green consumption, specifically, when consumers are induced a high construal level, moral identity has no effect on consumer green consumption, while when consumers are induced a low construal level, moral identity has a positive effect on consumer green consumption; the interaction of moral identity and construal level on green consumption is mediated by pro-environmental self-accountability.

This research enriches the literature on how to improve consumer green consumption, and thus has some managerial and public policy implications. But the authors only chose students as participants and the dependent measures are also limited. Future research can choose other type of sample and other dependent measures to test the generalization of the conclusion.

Prior literature of green consumption lacks research on mediation mechanism. Due to prior literature gaps, the authors integrate social-cognitive perspective moral identity theory, especially the in-group circle expansion of moral identity, and construal level theory to investigate the moderating effect of construal level on the relationship between moral identity and green consumption and the mediation effect of pro-environmental self-accountability.