When algorithms meet ethics: Mapping consumer moral responses to AI versus human marketing practices

In the contemporary digital marketing environment, companies generally conceal a key paradox through grand narratives of consumer empowerment: technological empowerment may lead to a loosening of consumers' ethical frameworks. This contradiction has given rise to an urgent theoretical dilemma: how to understand and reconcile consumer ethical behavior in the context of AI marketing? Drawing on the Hunt-Vitell moral framework, this study provides initial evidence through three experiments: AI customer service is more likely to induce unethical consumer behavior than human customer service, and this result remains robust after controlling for demographic variables. In-depth exploration of the underlying mechanism of this phenomenon, our findings are consistent with a dual-path psychological model: the systematic nature of AI activates consumers' teleological assessment tendencies, making it easier to rationalize unethical behavior through a result-oriented approach, while the emotional interaction of human customer service evokes deontological judgments, guiding consumers to weigh the moral dimensions of their behavior. Notably, the subtle yet critical moderating role played by service recovery strategies in this process is evident: insufficient recovery can exacerbate the adverse effects of teleological evaluation, while effective recovery can effectively inhibit unethical behavior by enhancing deontological judgments. By analyzing typical scenarios, such as self-service bargaining, this study not only provides a cognitive assessment-based perspective on understanding how the algorithmic nature of AI systems can be exploited but also offers novel insights into the governance of marketing ethics in the digital age.