Breaking the Karen Curse: A Look at Anti-Mistreatment Signage's Impact on Customer Mistreatment through Customer Empathy and Entitlement

This dissertation explores the phenomenon of customers mistreating service workers and examines how physical signage about customer behavior can influence the likelihood of such mistreatment occurring in a work environment. The impact of signage was studied broadly at an individual level in Study 1 by comparing the mistreatment service workers experience in workplaces with and without anti-mistreatment signage, and in more depth at an event level from the point of view of the customer in Study 2 using an experimental video vignette design. Results from the two studies indicate that anti-mistreatment signage can significantly reduce the likelihood of customer mistreatment when the sign's message is prevention-oriented. However, when signage is used outside experimental conditions, several factors—such as whether customers read the signage—may limit its effectiveness. Further, while the proposed mechanism through which signage influences customer mistreatment was not supported, higher customer state empathy and lower customer entitlement significantly reduced intentions to engage in mistreatment after customers became angered by poor service quality, highlighting the potential utility of targeting empathy and entitlement in future interventions. This dissertation contributes to the mistreatment literature by highlighting the importance of contextual elements—namely signage—in shaping customer behavior in service settings and calls for more research into mistreatment from the perpetrator's perspective. The findings also have implications for the empathy literature, calling into question the well-established effectiveness of perspective-taking interventions when they are adapted to a shorter, signage format.