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An essay on how feeling poor heightens consumers’ need to be heard and increases the extremity of attitude expression on financially unrelated issues
No full textA growing number of consumers worry about not having enough money to pay for necessities. Even in a developed country like the United States, seven out of ten people report feeling stressed and worried about their ability to pay for monthly expenses. Situational factors such as the recent pandemic and rising income inequality have further exacerbated financial instability. Recent news reports and findings in economics suggest that financial scarcity is associated with a rise in extreme opinions on issues that bear directly on these concerns. For example, people might oppose an increase in immigration quotas because it might affect the number of jobs that are available for the local population. Or, they might demand an increase in the minimum wage. However, the causal relationship between these variables has yet to be established. More important, and relevant to this dissertation, is the lack of clarity surrounding the effects of financial scarcity on attitude expression on issues and topics that are unrelated to one’s financial condition. Examples of these issues include consumer concerns about data privacy, tracking of their behavior on social media, or how one feels about certain businesses and products. This topic is of obvious importance to marketing because consumers are often asked to express their opinion about different services, consumption experiences and issues related to company policy and the extremity of their attitudinal responses can (mis)guide company actions. Financial scarcity can have negative implications for psychological well-being. In general, because financial scarcity diminishes an individual’s sense of self, attempts are made to restore it. In my dissertation, I suggest that people who lack money experience a sense of diminished self-significance and feel that they will not be considered seriously by others. This triggers a general motivation to be heard on various issues. Because attitudes are central to the self, this need to be heard manifests in extreme attitude expression on a range of topics that are not necessarily related to one’s financial condition. Two pilot studies tested the fundamental assumption that financial scarcity diminishes individuals’ sense of self and triggers a heightened need to be heard. Next, findings from seven studies showed that this heightened need to be heard leads individuals who feel disenfranchised to express their attitudes extremely even when these issues are unrelated to their financial condition. This empirical work also demonstrated that the effects of financial scarcity on extreme attitude expression are not the result of other well-known precursors of attitude expression (i.e., cognitive deliberation or arousal), but rather are mediated by a heightened need to be heard. These effects occur when financial scarcity is experienced subjectively (i.e., when participants are asked to recall instances when they did not have enough money to pay for expenses) as well as objectively (i.e., when their income level is measured). This research is important theoretically because it is the first to establish a causal link between experienced scarcity and the extremity of attitudinal response in unrelated domains. In addition, the identification of a different antecedent of attitude expression in the scarcity domain—a generalized motivation to be heard—has implications for how people respond to a multitude of marketing issues. Extreme attitude expression in reviews and surveys, for example, has a disproportionately large influence on other consumers. Thus, the identification of a segment of consumers who respond extremely is useful since marketers can focus on addressing their needs and mitigate the negative influence they could have on others. Certain policy implications are also noteworthy. For instance, the recent rise in extremism and social unrest among poorer sections of society might stem from people’s heightened need to be heard. Hence, processes that engage them and satisfy this need to be heard can help reduce the extremity of response and improve their well-being.</p
The role of affective (mood) states in perceptions of quality, sacrifice and value
No full textThree studies investigated the way that mood affects judgments of commercial products. Participants who felt either happy or sad as a result of watching a movie or writing about a personal event, evaluated products based on different combinations of brand name (favorable vs. unfavorable), specific attribute descriptions (favorable vs. unfavorable) and price (high vs. low). An application of a weighted-average model of information integration proposed by Anderson (1981) permitted an assessment of the impact of mood on (a) the subjective weight, or importance, attached to each piece of information presented, (b) the scale value of this information (i.e., the interpretation of its implications), and (c) an initial impression of the product formed before its specific features were considered. Three sets of findings are noteworthy: (1) The weight attached to brand name in making judgments increased with the positive affect that participants experienced, whereas the weight attached to price appeared to decrease. This was particularly true of value and liking judgments. In addition, desirable brands were interpreted as more favorable, and undesirable brands as more unfavorable, when subjects were in positive moods than when they were not. (2) Mood-congruent information was weighted more heavily than mood-incongruent information. When attribute-descriptions of a product were presented along with brand name, they had less influence when the brand name accompanying it was mood-congruent. When price information was conveyed, however, greater attention to the mood-congruent brand name decreased the influence of price's implications for quality but not its implications for sacrifice. As a result, high price led to more negative value judgments and purchasing intentions when the brand information accompanying it was mood-congruent than when it was not. (3) Participants' initial impressions of both the quality of a product and the sacrifice required to purchase it were greater when they were in a positive mood than when they were not. However, because their first impressions of product's value reflected a trade-off between their perceptions of its quality and perceptions of the sacrifice required, these impressions were not affected by mood.Made available in DSpace on 2011-05-07T13:30:51Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2
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"""Going against the flow"": the effects of dynamic orientational metaphors on consumer choice and persuasion"
Get PDFPast research shows that bodily experiences can activate concepts to which they are metaphorically linked and can influence judgments in other unrelated domains. Although some studies have focused on experiences that have a direct semantic correspondence to the target being judged (e.g., experience of physical warmth affects judgments of how “warm” a person is, experience of a fishy odor leads people to consider something as “fishy or suspicious” etc.), other embodied experiences do not fall into this category because they have a dynamic, directional character that is hard to capture in pure semantic terms (e.g., the experience of running one’s hands through water or stroking the fur of a pet in a particular direction). I suggest that these experiences have not only a sensory aspect (e.g., “wet” or “soft”) but a motor component as well that suggests movement in a specific direction. Captured linguistically in what are called dynamic orientation metaphors, the motor component of such experiences is important because it suggests movement in a particular direction. Characteristics of the movement (type and direction) have implications for behavior. I examine one such experience, the physical experience of going against the flow, and show how it can influence judgments and decisions in two different domains: Consumer choice and persuasion.
I show in a series of experiments that the sensorimotor experience of going against the flow affects the choices consumers make with participants picking products that are normatively less preferred. Further, I find that this effect only holds when the sensorimotor sensation is self-experienced and when people have to rely on their own internal sense of flow (i.e., when there is no external norm provided). When extended to the persuasion domain, I find that these experiences affect an individual’s desire to resist a persuasive message. A series of studies also shows that this effect is more evident when the experience is acquired actively (i.e., is volitional). This research important because it moves the embodied cognition literature from work that explores sensations that have descriptive terms in language to a consideration of more dynamic sensations that have a motor aspect. Such experiences, because they involve action and direction, possess the power to alter not only what people choose in unrelated situations (i.e., their behavior) but also their inclination to protest against a persuasive message.Submission published under a 24 month embargo labeled 'U of I Access', the embargo will last until 2017-12-01The student, Min A Kwon, accepted the attached license on 2015-08-14 at 15:35.The student, Min A Kwon, submitted this Dissertation for approval on 2015-08-14 at 15:42.This Dissertation was approved for publication on 2015-08-31 at 10:25.DSpace SAF Submission Ingestion Package generated from Vireo submission #8660 on 2016-03-02 at 14:04:57Made available in DSpace on 2016-03-02T20:23:05Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2
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How Good Gets Better and Bad Gets Worse: Understanding the Impact of Affect on Evaluations of Known Brands
No full textParticipants experiencing positive or negative affect judged products described by brand and attribute information. Four studies using parameter-estimation and reaction-time procedures determined whether the impact of affect on brand name was the result of its influence on (a) participants' perception of its evaluative implications at the time of encoding or (b) the importance they attached to it while integrating it with other information to compute a judgment. Results showed that positive affect increased the extremity of the brand's evaluative implications (i.e., its scale value) rather than the importance (or weight) that participants attached to it. A fifth experiment demonstrated the implications of these findings for product choices made 24 hours after affect was induced.</p
The role of affect in perceptions of brand name and price : effects and underlying cognitive mechanisms
No full textParticipants who had been induced to feel either happy or not were asked to judge products described by both categorical information (e.g., brand name) and individuating information (e.g., price). These judgments pertained to quality, monetary sacrifice, value, liking and willingness to buy. A parameter estimation procedure was used to isolate the simultaneous effects that affect can have (a) on the importance that participants attached to each piece of information in making judgments, (b) on their perception of its evaluative implications, and (c) as a source of information in its own right. Inducing positive affect at the time product information was received increased the influence of brand name on judgments. This increase was due to the impact of positive affect on not only the importance participants attached to brand name but also their perception of its favorableness. Participants also gave greater importance to brand name when its valence was evaluatively consistent with the affect they were experiencing. Finally, the affect that participants experienced influenced their initial impressions of the product. As expected, the impact of affect was often contingent on the type of information presented and in several cases the type of judgment to be made
Memory for Observed Social Interactions: The Influence of Processing Goals on the Mental Representation of Visual and Auditory Information
No full textThe utility of an information processing approach for behavioral price research
No full textIn their article, Cheng and Monroe provide a historical perspective on behavioral research in pricing. Their consolidation of evidence spanning four decades of research on pricing is testimony to the richness that can result from the convergence of different perspectives and fields on a common set of phenomena. Although the article is framed in terms of concepts that have emerged from substantive concerns, there might be some utility in thinking about the issues in behavioral price research within the framework of an information processing model. Such a model allows one to localize different effects at various stages of processing and helps to raise additional issues to be investigated.</p
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