Drawing on institutional theory and discursive psychology, this article elucidates how actors use emotion discourse to undermine the legitimacy of consumer practices. Based on an empirical investigation of the bullfighting controversy in Spain, our work shows how activists engage in the production and circulation of compelling emotional prototypes of their adversaries. Such emotional prototypes constitute the discursive foundations of a pathic stigma, which, once established, taints the identity of the social groups associated with the practice. Our work frames the centrality of pathic stigmatization as a cultural mechanism mediating the relationship between emotion discourse and the subsequent delegitimization of consumer practices. We make three key contributions to the literature: we advance a rhetorical perspective on emotions and their role in deinstitutionalization processes; we further develop the theory of marketplace sentiments by showing how sentiments operate downstream; and we provide evidence of the sociocultural mechanisms underpinning the emotional vilification, stereotyping and stigmatization of consumer collectives.
参考文献：Carmen Valor, Javier Lloveras, Eleni Papaoikonomou. (2021). The Role of Emotion Discourse and Pathic Stigma in the Delegitimization of Consumer Practices. Journal of Consumer Research, 47(5), 636-653.
This research investigates reviewing experts on online review platforms. The main hypothesis is that greater expertise in generating reviews leads to greater restraint from extreme summary evaluations. The authors argue that greater experience generating reviews facilitates processing and elaboration and enhances the number of attributes implicitly considered in evaluations, which reduces the likelihood of assigning extreme summary ratings. This restraint-of-expertise hypothesis is tested across different review platforms (TripAdvisor, Qunar, and Yelp), shown for both assigned ratings and review text sentiment, and demonstrated both between (experts vs. novices) and within reviewers (expert vs. pre-expert). Two experiments replicate the main effect and provide support for the attribute-based explanation. Field studies demonstrate two major consequences of the restraint-of-expertise effect. (i) Reviewing experts (vs. novices), as a whole, have less impact on the aggregate valence metric, which is known to affect page-rank and consumer consideration. (ii) Experts systematically benefit and harm service providers with their ratings. For service providers that generally provide mediocre (excellent) experiences, reviewing experts assign significantly higher (lower) ratings than novices. This research provides important caveats to the existing marketing practice of service providers incentivizing reviewing experts and provides strategic implications for how platforms should adopt rating scales and aggregate ratings.
参考文献：Peter Nguyen, Xin (Shane) Wang, Xi Li, June Cotte. (2021). Reviewing Experts’ Restraint from Extremes and Its Impact on Service Providers. Journal of Consumer Research, 47(5), 654-674.
More information is available today than ever before, yet at times consumers choose to avoid it. Even with useful information (I should find out), people may prefer ignorance (But I don’t want to). Seven studies (N = 4,271) and five supplemental studies (N = 3,013) apply the concept of “cover” to information avoidance for consumer choices with real financial consequences. More consumers avoid information with cover—that is, when they can attribute their decision to another feature of a product or decision context rather than to information they want to avoid. Cover increases avoidance when consumers face intrapersonal conflict—when consumers want to avoid information that they believe they should receive (e.g., calorie information). As such, the effect of cover is reduced by decreasing want–should conflict, whether by reducing the should preference to receive information or the want preference to avoid it. Furthermore, cover increases avoidance by helping consumers justify a decision to themselves: avoidance increases only when people can attribute their decision to a relevant (vs. irrelevant) product feature and operates in public and private settings. Together, this research offers theoretical insights into consumers’ information avoidance and how cover itself operates, with practical implications for marketers.
参考文献：Kaitlin Woolley, Jane L Risen. (2021). Hiding from the Truth: When and How Cover Enables Information Avoidance. Journal of Consumer Research, 47(5), 675-697.
This article explores the consequences of psychological ownership going beyond the specific relationship with the possession to guide behavior in unrelated situations. Across seven studies, we find that psychological ownership leads to a boost in self-esteem, which encourages individuals to be more altruistic. In addition, we show that the effect of psychological ownership on prosocial behavior is not driven by self-efficacy, perceived power, reciprocity, feeling well-off, or affect. Examining materialism and mine-me sensitivity as individual differences moderating the effect of psychological ownership on prosocial behavior, we find that the effect does not hold for individuals low on materialism or mine-me sensitivity. Finally, we attenuate the effect of psychological ownership on prosocial tendencies by making the negative attributes of one’s possessions relevant.
参考文献：Ata Jami, Maryam Kouchaki, Francesca Gino. (2021). I Own, So I Help Out: How Psychological Ownership Increases Prosocial Behavior. Journal of Consumer Research, 47(5), 698-715.
Leisure is desirable and beneficial, yet consumers frequently forgo leisure in favor of other activities—namely, work. Why? We propose that goal conflict plays an important role. Seven experiments demonstrate that perceiving greater goal conflict shapes how consumers allocate time to work and leisure—even when those activities are unrelated to the conflicting goals. This occurs because goal conflict increases reliance on salient justifications, influencing how much time people spend on subsequent, unrelated activities. Because work tends to be easier to justify and leisure harder to justify, goal conflict increases time spent on work and decreases time spent on leisure. Thus, despite the conflicting goals being independent of the specific work and leisure activities considered (i.e., despite goal conflict being “incidental”), perceiving greater goal conflict encourages work and discourages leisure. The findings further understanding of how consumers allocate time to work and leisure, incidental effects of goal conflict on decision-making, and the role of justification in consumer choice. They also have implications for the use of “time-saving” technologies and the marketing of leisure activities.
参考文献：Jordan Etkin, Sarah A Memmi. (2021). Goal Conflict Encourages Work and Discourages Leisure. Journal of Consumer Research, 47(5), 716-736.
The present article explores the effect of memory efficacy on consumer behavior—particularly on consumer’s likelihood to behave “virtuously,” that is, in line with standards, such as ideals, values, morals, and social expectations. Memory efficacy refers to people’s general belief that they will be able to remember in the future the things they are experiencing or doing in the present. We hypothesize and find across five studies that when consumers have low-memory efficacy (vs. control), they are less likely to behave virtuously because their actions seem less consequential for their self-concept (i.e., less self-diagnostic). Using two different experimental manipulations of memory efficacy, we examine its effect on virtuous behavior in the context of prosocial choices—that is, charitable giving (study 1A) and volunteering (studies 1B and 2). We then explore our proposed underlying mechanism (perceptions of self-diagnosticity) using causal-chain mediation (studies 3A and 3B) and moderation approaches (studies 4 and 5) in the context of food choices. We conclude with a discussion of the practical and theoretical implications of our findings.
参考文献：Maferima Touré-Tillery, Maryam Kouchaki. (2021). You Will Not Remember This: How Memory Efficacy Influences Virtuous Behavior. Journal of Consumer Research, 47(5), 737-754.
This research seeks to examine, first, whether and why consumers perceive divisible versus indivisible numbers differently and, second, how such divergent perceptions influence consumer preferences for marketer-created entities associated with divisible versus indivisible numbers. Integrating insights from two different literatures—numerical cognition and loneliness—we propose and find that numbers perceived to be divisible (vs. indivisible) are viewed as having more “connections” and are therefore deemed to be less lonely. Building on these findings and the literature on compensatory consumption, we then propose and demonstrate that a temporary feeling of loneliness increases participants’ relative preference for various targets—products, attributes, and prices—associated with divisible (vs. indivisible) numbers, which are perceived to be relatively more connected and less lonely. It merits mention that our findings are triangulated across a wide variety of numbers, different product categories, and multiple operationalizations of loneliness.
参考文献：Dengfeng Yan, Jaideep Sengupta. (2021). The Effects of Numerical Divisibility on Loneliness Perceptions and Consumer Preferences. Journal of Consumer Research, 47(5), 755-771.
Four studies, across a range of domains, find a dragging-down effect in which consumers purchase fewer units of a product when a discount applies to more units. For example, consumers buy fewer peaches when each customer can buy up to three peaches at a discount than when each customer can buy only one peach at a discount or when there is no discount at all. In contrast to basic economic principles, this dragging-down effect implies that consumers purchase less (more) when the per-unit price is lower (higher). We propose and our results support an acceptability account: consumers will adopt the price-increase point (i.e., maximum discounted quantity) as their purchase quantity if that point falls within an acceptable range, and will ignore that point and purchase their initially preferred quantity instead if the price-increase point falls below the acceptable range. The current work enriches existing research on anchoring and pricing and carries implications for consumers, marketers, and policy-makers.
参考文献：Shirley Zhang, Abigail B Sussman, Christopher K Hsee. (2021). A Dragging-Down Effect: Consumer Decisions in Response to Price Increases. Journal of Consumer Research, 47(5), 772-786.
Consumers are often frustrated by customer service. But could a simple shift in language help improve customer satisfaction? We suggest that linguistic concreteness—the tangibility, specificity, or imaginability of words employees use when speaking to customers—can shape consumer attitudes and behaviors. Five studies, including text analysis of over 1,000 real consumer–employee interactions in two different field contexts, demonstrate that customers are more satisfied, willing to purchase, and purchase more when employees speak to them concretely. This occurs because customers infer that employees who use more concrete language are listening (i.e., attending to and understanding their needs). These findings deepen understanding of how language shapes consumer behavior, reveal a psychological mechanism by which concreteness impacts person perception, and provide a straightforward way that managers could help enhance customer satisfaction.
