Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-28 Cooperative journals: 《心理科学进展》
Abstract： The pneumonia outbreak caused by the Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) has been defined as a public health emergency by the World Public Health Organization and poses a serious threat to economic development worldwide. Since that COVID-19 is highly contagious, and the number of infected people and is unprecedented, many governments have taken strong measures to control the spread of COVID-19. In the face of sudden major disasters, people are prone to panic. As a result, individuals pay more attention to personal protection-related issues, and the consumption of protective and health products increases significantly (Yang et al., 2020). Because COVID-19 is spread mainly by droplets and contact, consumers are avoiding products that others may have touched or used for fear of catching the virus. Data from iiMedia Research also showed that the number of users of shared charging banks in China maintained rapid growth to 307 million in 2019. However, due to COVID-19, the number of users dropped to 229 million in 2020. It can be seen that consumers are increasingly concerned about health-related issues, thus amplifying the potential contamination effect on consumer behaviors. It has been more than 20 years since contamination effect was first introduced into psychology. Up to now, contamination effect has been widely adopted to explain behaviors in many fields, including product evaluation, celebrity effect, organ transplantation, preference for shrine, valuation of original artwork, cross-cultural differences in collecting behavior, gambling decisions, individual abilities and performance, and even romantic relationships. Although consumers are often faced with a variety of content cues to induce their perception of contamination in daily consumption, there is little known about what consumer behaviors will occur under the influence of contamination effect and what the underlying mechanisms and boundary conditions are for these behaviors. There is still no an integrated research framework that can generalize and explain the application of contamination effects to consumer behavior to answer these questions. More importantly, the continuous updating of emerging research backgrounds such as Internet +, new retail and big data provide new insights for the study of contamination effects, however, there is little systematic review of these effects and paradigms. In this study, we mainly review the definition and characteristics of contamination effect in the studies of consumer behavior, and then explore the antecedents of contamination effect from the aspects of exposure factors, location factors, product factors and social factors, and further summarize its negative and positive effects on consumer behavior. Finally, the theoretical basis and boundary conditions of contamination effect are well discussed. Based on these discussions, the future research direction of contamination effect in the field of consumer behavior is prospected.
Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-27 Cooperative journals: 《心理学报》
Abstract： Previous research has long paid attention to how to improve persuasive effectiveness in charitable donation. Based on moral foundation theory (MFT) and stereotype content model (SCM), this paper proposes that a match between moral appeal and social perception leads higher persuasive effectiveness of individual donation. More specifically, relative to those who are exposed to a binding appeal, consumers who are exposed to an individualizing appeal are more willing to donate for warmth-oriented organizations. However, for competence- oriented organizations, a binding appeal will garner higher persuasive effectiveness than an individualizing appeal. Furthermore, two types of efficacy (i.e., self-efficacy and response efficacy) mediate the interaction effect of moral appeal and social perception on donation effectiveness. Three lab experiments were conducted to examine these hypotheses. In particular, experiment 1 employed a 3 (moral appeal: binding appeal vs. individualizing appeal vs. neutral) × 2 (social perception: warmth-oriented vs. competence-oriented) two-way between-subjects design. We found that competence-oriented (vs. warmth-oriented) organizations will obtain better donation persuasion results when consumers are exposed to binding (vs. individualizing) appeal, supporting the hypotheses H1a and H1b. Then, in experiment 2, we identified the underlying mechanism, such that the interaction effect is driven by consumers’ response efficacy and self-efficacy, verifying the hypotheses H2a and H2b. Experiment 3 further examined the mediating role of different types of efficacy using a moderation approach. Participants were randomly assigned to one of condition of 3 (moral appeal: binding appeal vs. individualizing appeal vs. neutral) × 2 (social perception: warmth- oriented vs. competence-oriented) × 2 (efficacy: self-efficacy vs. response efficacy). Experiment 3 replicated the findings of previous experiments, showing the robustness of our conclusions. We also ruled out some alternative explanations (e.g., empathy) in the study.Theoretically, this research observes for the first time the interactive effect of moral appeal and social perception, thus extending both moral foundation theory and stereotype content model. The current study also enriches existing donation literature by examining the mediating role of response efficacy and self-efficacy. Managerially, this research has rich implications to charitable organization and companies when they aim to improve persuasive effectiveness in an individual donation.
Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-27 Cooperative journals: 《心理学报》
Abstract： As a means of communication to help consumers quickly identify the advantages and disadvantages of brands or products, the ranking list has been paid more and more attention by merchants and consumers. However, most of the existing researches on the ranking effect focuses on comparing the influence mechanism of different ranking list items or positions on consumers, ignoring the influence of different display modes of the same list on consumer evaluation. For this purpose, based on the spatial metaphor theory, the paper studied different display modes (vertical or horizontal) of the same ranking list to explore their impacts on the difference in consumer evaluation of items ranking list.This study intends to explore the above relationship and its internal mechanism through five experiments. Firstly, two online experiments (Experiment 1a [N = 200] and Experiment 1b [N = 332], scenario of mobile phone brand evaluation) were conducted to verify that the evaluation polarization effect existed in both the positive ranking list and the negative ranking list. Secondly, Experiment 2 (N = 228) was a laboratory experiment to expand the partial ranking list to the whole item ranking list form (gift evaluation scenario). The results show that in the full-ranking list form, consumers’ evaluation difference of items in the vertical ranking list is significantly higher than that in the horizontal ranking list, with the increase of the number of items in the ranking list, evaluation difference becomes more obvious.Experiment 3 (N = 187) adopted common school ranking scenarios to verify the mediating role of item perception difference in the above relationship, the higher evaluation polarization effect of the vertical ranking list than the horizontal ranking list is due to Consumers have greater perceived item differences for items in vertical ranking lists. Finally, Experiment 4 (N = 279) applied the form of brand ranking list to verify the main effect, meanwhile, the moderating effect of attribute evaluability was also examined. When the evaluability of attributes is low, the evaluation polarization effect of different lists will appear. On the contrary, when the item attribute of the ranking list is highly evaluable, this polarization effect of evaluation disappeared.This study expands the relevant theories of ranking effect and spatial metaphor, and provides practical guidance for merchants to flexibly use ranking lists to effectively communicate with consumers. In particular, the contributions of the study include the following: (1) we explore the influence of the change of ranking item spatial position on consumer item evaluation, and thus expand the theoretical framework of ranking effect research; (2) we effectively combine spatial and numerical elements in the context of the ranking list, further expend the theory of numerical cognitive bias under the same dimension of number representation forms; (3) we expand the theoretical application scenarios of “spatial metaphor”. In this study, the two dimensions of spatial metaphor theory (location metaphor + distance metaphor) were employed to systematically illustrate the internal mechanism of the influence of spatial representation of ranking list on evaluating polarization effect. Our study effectively brings the two sub-dimensions of spatial metaphor theory into the overall consideration of the same theoretical framework; (4) we expand the precursor psychological factors of evaluation polarization from a cognitive perspective. The emergence of the study increases and expands the expression forms and application scenarios of evaluating polarization effect, deeply exploring the psychological cognitive process of evaluating polarization effect in theoretical scenarios.
Subjects: Psychology >> Cognitive Psychology submitted time 2021-08-16
Abstract： "
Peer Review Status:
Awaiting Review
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