The Role of Ethical Perceptions in the Acceptance of Innovative Sport Technologies for Competition: Analysis of Carbon Plate Running Shoes

Abstract

The introduction of carbon plate fibre shoes (CFPSs) has been a very significant development in long-distance road running, resulting in an unprecedented number of records being broken across all standardized road distances. This has triggered intense ethical debate regarding the use of those shoes in competitions. This paper examines how ethical factors, on the basis of the multiple ethical scale (MES), explain the acceptance of these shoes among amateur athletes in a sample of 252 amateur athletes. Relationships between variables were modelled using a structural equation model adjusted with partial least squares (PLS-SEM). We also conducted a necessary condition analysis (NCA) to determine whether one or more ethical factors are necessary conditions for the acceptance of CFPSs. The PLS-SEM results indicate that relativism and consequentialism, which include egoist and utilitarian motivations, are significant and influential ethical variables for explaining the acceptance of CFPSs. Similarly, NCA shows that all the moral variables contained in the MES and considered in this study (moral equity, relativism, egoism, and utilitarianism) are necessary for the behavioral intention to use CFPSs in competitions. The use of the MES constructs as antecedents to evaluate the acceptance of advancements in sport technology and its implementation with both PLS-SEM and NCA is novel in the assessment of new sport equipment acceptance. The results of this paper suggest that the MES can be a valuable approach for assessing attitudes toward technological advances in sports.