Returning Products (Social Norms) (RP)

1. Abstract

The Returning Products (Social Norms) (RP) scale is a four-item psychometric measurement instrument developed by Lloyd C. Harris in 2008 to assess an individual’s perception of the social acceptability and normative approval of fraudulent and opportunistic product returns among their primary reference groups, specifically close friends, family members, and significant others. Emerging from retail management and consumer psychology literature, the scale operationalizes the Theory of Planned Behavior construct of subjective norms within the domain of consumer misbehavior—specifically opportunistic return fraud, wardrobing, and the return of customer-damaged merchandise. Administered using a standard 7-point Likert response format ranging from 1 (“Strongly Disagree”) to 7 (“Strongly Agree”), the instrument quantifies the degree to which an individual perceives both injunctive norms (what important referents approve or disapprove of) and descriptive norms (what important referents typically do) regarding post-use merchandise returns.

Empirical evaluation of the Returning Products (Social Norms) scale reveals robust psychometric properties across diverse consumer samples. In Harris’s foundational study published in the Journal of Retailing, the scale exhibited high internal consistency reliability, with a Cronbach’s alpha coefficient exceeding .85 and composite reliability values well above recommended psychometric thresholds. Confirmatory factor analysis demonstrates unidimensionality, with high standardized factor loadings across all four indicators and excellent discriminant validity against related constructs such as consumer machiavellianism, neutralization techniques, perceived return policy leniency, and general ethical ideologies. The instrument serves as a critical predictive variable in structural equation models of fraudulent return proclivity and retail shrinkage, rendering it invaluable for behavioral researchers, ethical decision-making scholars, and retail policy strategists.

2. Keywords

Consumer misbehavior, fraudulent return proclivity, subjective norms, retail borrowing, wardrobing, retail shrinkage, Theory of Planned Behavior, descriptive norms, consumer ethics, deshopping, psychometrics, scale validation

3. Authors

The Returning Products (Social Norms) scale was authored and validated by Lloyd C. Harris.

• Author: Lloyd C. Harris, PhD
• Affiliation at Time of Publication: Professor of Marketing, Department of Marketing and Strategy, Cardiff Business School, Cardiff University, Cardiff, United Kingdom.
• Subsequent/Current Affiliations: Professor of Marketing, Birmingham Business School, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham, United Kingdom.
• Scholarly Focus: Service dynamics, dysfunctional customer behavior, consumer fraud, retail management, and organizational culture.
• Key Publication: Harris, L. C. (2008). Fraudulent return proclivity: An empirical analysis. Journal of Retailing, 84(4), 461–476.

4. Purpose

The primary purpose of the Returning Products (Social Norms) (RP) scale is to measure an individual’s internalized perception of social acceptability, peer tolerance, and familial endorsement regarding illegitimate retail merchandise returns. Retail fraud—often manifesting as “wardrobing” (purchasing apparel or consumer goods, using them for a specific event or short-term utility, and returning them for a full refund), “deshopping,” or returning items damaged due to personal negligence rather than manufacturer defect—costs the global retail industry tens of billions of dollars annually. Despite these substantial financial losses, consumer research historically struggled to model why otherwise law-abiding, ethically oriented individuals systematically engage in opportunistic return fraud.

Harris designed the RP scale to investigate the non-economic, socio-cognitive antecedents that facilitate this aberrant behavior. While economic models hypothesize that consumers execute fraudulent returns purely based on cost-benefit rationalizations, perceived detection probability, or financial opportunism, social-cognitive psychology establishes that human conduct is heavily regulated by immediate peer contexts. The RP scale isolates whether a consumer operates within an interpersonal micro-climate that legitimizes, trivializes, or actively models retail fraud.

In applied academic research, the scale is utilized to:

• Explain variance in consumer proclivity toward illegitimate product returns beyond individual personality traits (such as Machiavellianism, sensation seeking, or low self-control).
• Test complex mediation and moderation models where peer normative climate interacts with techniques of neutralization (e.g., “denial of injury” toward large corporate retailers).
• Assist commercial retailers and consumer behavior analysts in benchmarking how social contagion effects propagate return abuses among specific demographic cohorts, notably young adults and university students.
• Evaluate the potential efficacy of retail intervention strategies, such as customer communication framing that alters perceived social consensus around merchandise return ethics.

5. Psychological Construct

The construct captured by the Returning Products (Social Norms) scale is situated at the intersection of consumer psychology, social influence theory, and behavioral ethics. Specifically, it operationalizes perceived reference group normative support within the narrow behavioral domain of returning used or damaged consumer goods.

Deconstruction of the Normative Construct

Social norms represent the implicit or explicit rules and expectations that guide and constrain social behavior. Within the psychometric architecture of the RP scale, the construct integrates two closely related dimensions of social norms identified in social psychological literature:

• Injunctive Norms: Refers to perceptions of what key social referents approve or disapprove of. In this scale, items such as “My friends think it is acceptable to return a product that has been used” and “Returning used products is accepted by my family” evaluate the perceived moral and behavioral tolerance granted by primary socialization agents.
• Descriptive Norms: Refers to perceptions of what key social referents actually do in practice. Item 3, “Most of my friends would return an item they had used,” captures behavioral modeling. Consumers look to their peers to infer what is normative; observing or inferring that friends execute used-good returns reduces moral apprehension and personal culpability.

Family vs. Peer Group Referents

A distinctive feature of Harris’s construct conceptualization is its deliberate dual focus on both peer groups (“friends”) and primary kinship groups (“family”). Consumer socialization literature demonstrates that while early moral foundational norms are established through primary familial socialization, contemporary behavioral norms—particularly surrounding consumer spending, peer status, and opportunistic consumption—are overwhelmingly governed by friend networks. By sampling normative acceptance across both friends (“My friends think…”, “Most of my friends…”) and family (“accepted by my family”, “People who are important to me”), the RP construct achieves a holistic representation of an individual’s personal moral community.

Domain Specificity

General scales measuring perceived social norms or moral consensus often fail to predict localized consumer infractions because broad social norms typically condemn “theft” or “fraud.” However, consumer misbehavior research emphasizes that consumers do not categorize returning a worn dress, a used power tool, or an accidentally dropped electronics item as conventional theft. Instead, they view it as exploiting ambiguous return policies. The RP construct is intentionally domain-specific, capturing the micro-normative climate that selectively tolerates this specific gray-market consumer practice.

6. Theoretical Framework

The Returning Products (Social Norms) scale is theoretically anchored in several landmark paradigms within social psychology, criminology, and behavioral economics.

1. The Theory of Planned Behavior (Ajzen, 1991)

The direct theoretical foundation of the scale is Icek Ajzen’s Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB). The TPB posits that behavioral intention is the most proximal predictor of human behavior, and this intention is determined by three core constructs: attitude toward the behavior, perceived behavioral control, and subjective norms. Ajzen defined subjective norms as the perceived social pressure to perform or not perform the behavior in question. In Harris’s (2008) structural framework, subjective norms regarding product returns directly influence an individual’s fraudulent return proclivity, both directly and indirectly through its interaction with personal moral obligation and neutralization strategies.

2. Social Learning and Differential Association Theory

Underlying the operationalization of peer-based return behaviors is Edwin Sutherland’s Differential Association Theory and Albert Bandura’s Social Learning Theory. Differential Association theory asserts that deviant behavior is learned in intimate personal groups through communication, where individuals acquire not only the techniques of committing infractions but also the specific direction of motives, drives, rationalizations, and attitudes. When a consumer’s primary associations are characterized by an excess of definitions favorable to violating retail return policies over definitions unfavorable to such violations, the consumer adopts those practices as legitimate.

3. Techniques of Neutralization (Sykes & Matza, 1957)

Gresham Sykes and David Matza posited that delinquents frequently subscribe to conventional social values but employ cognitive mechanisms—techniques of neutralization—to silence internal moral sanctions prior to committing offenses. The Returning Products (Social Norms) construct interfaces with neutralization theory by providing social validation for these cognitive rationalizations. When an individual perceives that family and peers accept the return of used or customer-damaged items, the “denial of injury” (e.g., “retailers factor this into their margins”) and “appeal to higher loyalties” become socially reinforced and shared group narratives, stripping the behavior of personal guilt or stigmatization.

7. Validity

The psychometric validity of the Returning Products (Social Norms) scale was established through rigorous empirical testing in Harris’s (2008) foundational study, followed by subsequent replications in retail management and consumer ethics research.

Construct and Convergent Validity

Construct validity evaluates whether an operationalized scale adequately represents the target theoretical construct. During the development process, Harris generated and refined candidate items through comprehensive literature reviews of retail borrowing, deshopping, and consumer deviance, supplemented by exploratory qualitative interviews. The final four items demonstrated strong convergent validity, evidenced by high and statistically significant standardized factor loadings ($> .70, p < .001$) on the latent construct. The Average Variance Extracted (AVE) for the scale comfortably exceeded the widely accepted .50 benchmark, demonstrating that the variance explained by the latent construct is substantially greater than variance due to measurement error.

Discriminant Validity

To verify that the scale measures a distinct psychological phenomenon rather than general consumer ethical laxity or broader social permissiveness, discriminant validity was evaluated using the Fornell and Larcker (1981) criterion. The square root of the AVE for the RP construct was substantially higher than its inter-construct correlations with related latent variables, including:

• Consumer Machiavellianism (manipulative social tendencies)
• Neutralization proclivity (cognitive rationalization tendencies)
• Perceptions of retail policy leniency
• Perceived likelihood of detection / sanction severity
• Fraudulent return proclivity (the primary outcome construct)

Predictive and Nomological Validity

Nomological validity was demonstrated through structural equation modeling (SEM). The scale functioned exactly as hypothesized within a broader nomological network: social norms regarding returning products showed a strong, positive, and statistically significant path coefficient to overall Fraudulent Return Proclivity ($eta = .31, p < .001$ in the baseline model). When consumers perceived higher normative support from friends and family, their personal intentions and past frequencies of executing fraudulent returns increased correspondingly, confirming the predictive power of the instrument.

8. Reliability

The reliability of the Returning Products (Social Norms) scale has been consistently substantiated across empirical studies.

Internal Consistency

In Harris’s (2008) initial survey sample consisting of consumer respondents with retail return experience, the scale achieved an internal consistency reliability coefficient (Cronbach’s alpha) of $.86$. Subsequent studies investigating consumer return fraud across distinct national contexts and age demographics have reported alpha coefficients consistently spanning from $.82$ to $.89$.

Composite Reliability

Because Cronbach’s alpha can under- or overestimate reliability when the assumption of tau-equivalence is violated, structural researchers utilize Composite Reliability (CR) within SEM frameworks. The composite reliability for the four-item scale in Harris’s measurement model was calculated at $.87$, well above the conventional $.70$ threshold recommended by Bagozzi and Yi (1988) and Hair et al. This confirms that the indicators share a high degree of common variance in measuring the underlying normative construct.

Measurement Stability

Analyses of item-to-total correlations revealed that every indicator correlated strongly with the composite score ($r > .65$), with no single item’s deletion leading to an improvement in the overall reliability coefficient. The inclusion of both “used product” return items and “customer-damaged product” return items maintained internal consistency, demonstrating that consumers’ normative assessments of these related forms of opportunistic return behavior are psychologically tightly coupled.

9. Factor Analysis

The dimensional structure of the Returning Products (Social Norms) scale was evaluated using both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA).

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

During preliminary scale development, principal components and maximum likelihood factor extractions with oblique (Promax) rotation were conducted on a broader pool of consumer misbehavior items. The four social norm items converged cleanly onto a single, independent factor with an eigenvalue greater than 1.0, explaining more than 68% of the total variance among the items. Cross-loadings on other conceptual dimensions (such as personal deterrence, retail dissatisfaction, or perceived financial gain) remained negligible ($< .25$).

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

In the final structural validation phase, Harris subjected the items to CFA using maximum likelihood estimation in AMOS/LISREL. The four-item, single-factor model demonstrated an outstanding fit to the empirical data. Standard model fit indices satisfied established psychometric criteria:

• Chi-Square / Degrees of Freedom ($\chi^2 / df$): $< 2.50$ (indicating low discrepancy between observed and implied covariance matrices)
• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): $> .98$
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI / NNFI): $> .97$
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): $< .05$ ($90% \text{ CI } [.021, .078]$)
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): $< .03$

Standardized factor loadings for the four items were uniformly high, ranging between $.74$ and $.86$. These parameter estimates confirm that a unidimensional latent variable adequately and parsimoniously accounts for the covariation among the indicators.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

The complete technical specifications of the Returning Products (Social Norms) instrument are summarized below:

• Instrument Name: Returning Products (Social Norms) (RP)
• Author: Lloyd C. Harris (2008)
• Construct Measured: Perceived reference group (friends and family) normative acceptability and behavioral modeling of fraudulent/opportunistic product returns.
• Instrument Type: Self-administered psychometric survey questionnaire.
• Item Count: 4 items.
• Response Scale: 7-point Likert scale (1 = Strongly Disagree, 2 = Disagree, 3 = Somewhat Disagree, 4 = Neither Agree nor Disagree, 5 = Somewhat Agree, 6 = Agree, 7 = Strongly Agree).
• Scoring Rules:
  • All 4 items are positively keyed (no reverse-scored items).
  • Scoring Procedure: Items are either averaged to produce an overall normative index ranging from 1.00 to 7.00, or summed to produce an aggregate score ranging from 4 to 28.
  • Interpretation: Higher scores reflect greater perceived social acceptability and normative support among peers and family for returning used or damaged products. Lower scores indicate an interpersonal climate that views opportunistic returns as impermissible or unacceptable.
• Administration Time: Approximately 1 to 2 minutes.
• Target Population: Adult consumers (general retail consumer samples, university student cohorts).

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Returning Products (Social Norms) scale was first published in 2008 in the Journal of Retailing.

• Publication Year: 2008.
• Copyright Holder: New York University / Elsevier Inc. (for the article publication); scale content authored by Lloyd C. Harris.
• Access & Licensing: The scale items were published directly within the academic literature for non-commercial scientific research. Academic scholars, university researchers, and graduate students may typically utilize the scale for non-commercial scholarly research without payment of royalty fees, provided full academic citation is accorded to Harris (2008).
• Commercial Use: Commercial entities, corporate retail consulting firms, or commercial survey platforms seeking to integrate the scale into proprietary diagnostic tools or profitable ventures should verify licensing terms or contact the author/publisher to secure formal permission.

12. References

Below are primary academic works informing the theoretical, methodological, and empirical framework of the scale:

• Ajzen, I. (1991). The theory of planned behavior. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 50(2), 179–211. https://doi.org/10.1016/0749-5978(91)90020-T
• Bagozzi, R. P., & Yi, Y. (1988). On the evaluation of structural equation models. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 16(1), 74–94. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02723327
• Cialdini, R. B., Reno, R. R., & Kallgren, C. A. (1990). A focus theory of normative conduct: Recycling the concept of norms to reduce littering in public places. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 58(6), 1015–1026. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.58.6.1015
• Fornell, C., & Larcker, D. F. (1981). Evaluating structural equation models with unobservable variables and measurement error. Journal of Marketing Research, 18(1), 39–50. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224378101800104
• Harris, L. C. (2008). Fraudulent return proclivity: An empirical analysis. Journal of Retailing, 84(4), 461–476. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jretai.2008.09.003
• Harris, L. C. (2010). Fraudulent return proclivity: The determinants of deshopping. The Service Industries Journal, 30(6), 973–985. https://doi.org/10.1080/02642060802317849
• King, T., & Dennis, C. (2006). Unethical consumer behaviour: Deshopping. Qualitative Market Research: An International Journal, 9(3), 282–299. https://doi.org/10.1108/13522750610671707
• Schmidt, F. R., Babin, B. J., & Boles, J. S. (1999). An empirical test of consumer deshopping behavior. Advances in Consumer Research, 26(1), 122–128.
• Sykes, G. M., & Matza, D. (1957). Techniques of neutralization: A theory of delinquency. American Sociological Review, 22(6), 664–670. https://doi.org/10.2307/2089195

13. Items of the Scale