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Summary meeting 8 Consumer Understanding and Behaviour HFV1003
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Meeting 8: social influencesSOURCE: IRMACK
Psychological reactance = it is a motivational state in which a freedom has been restricted. So, the
psychological reactance is viewed as a threat to freedom. It occurs when a person feels that someone
or something is taken away their choices or limiting their range of alternatives.
- The implication principle: when individuals perceive a threat to their freedom, they also
identify (consciously or nonconsciously) other implied threats.
- The source of the message: can contribute to the psychological reactance, as much authority
is the source the higher can be the psychological reactance. Reactance is more likely to occur
when the government is the source of the restriction condition, especially because
individuals draw implications regarding future restrictions to freedom from the intention and
power of the source.
- Political ideology: is a set of attitudes containing cognitive, affective, and motivational
components that organize individuals’ values and beliefs. Similarly, we consider conservative
and liberal orientations as generalized personality orientations that parsimoniously span the
political ideology continuum in most cultural contexts. They focus on the source of the
message and investigate how messages from certain sources may impair persuasion
attempts based on consumers’ political orientation. More specifically, they focus on
consumer reactions to consumption regulations from the government. They investigate
whether people’s political ideology influences their reactions to consumption regulations
that come from the government (vs. from nongovernmental sources).
o Conservatives are likely to view government initiatives to intervene in consumer
choices as an attempt to interfere in how free markets work. Therefore, a threat to
consumer freedom becomes a threat to free markets for conservatives.
o Liberals view the government as an institution that provides the social conditions
(e.g., education, health care) that ensure people the freedom to pursue their own
happiness. According to liberals, government regulations that restrict individual
freedoms may be deemed as a means to protect equality, with an aim to provide the
greatest well-being for the greatest number of people. As a result, liberals are likely
to make trade-offs between freedom and equality when they evaluate government
restrictions.
The article proposes that it’s important to understand the political ideology of the population in
order to know how they will react to governments. They proposed that consumer reaction to
consumption regulation will depend on how liberal or conservative a person is, but it will depend a
well on the source of the regulation (government vs company).
In the article they proposed that conservatives are more likely to react to a new law when it
forbidden some common behavior such as smoking or using the phone while driving, and this effect is
higher when the law comes from a governments than when not. They proposed as well that the
mechanism underlying this effect is the psychological reactance.
Summary
- In Study 1, they demonstrate via a natural experiment that conservatives are more likely to
go against a freedom-restricting law.
- In Study 2, they replicate the results from the natural experiment with a controlled
experiment, demonstrate the mediating role of perceived threat to freedom based on beliefs
, about future implications, and rule out an alternative explanation based on party leadership.
Further, we show that the effect is accentuated for conservatives with high trait reactance. In
- Study 3, they investigate the moderating role of the source to show that intent to purchase
an unhealthy food increases among more conservative individuals when they view a front-of-
package nutritional label that has a government source versus a company source. This study
also demonstrates the mediating role of a sense of threat to freedom, a hallmark of
reactance.
- Finally, in Study 4, we find that the FDA may use a notification, rather than a warning
message, to increase conservative consumers’ negative perceptions and quitting intentions
of electronic cigarettes. By demonstrating that using a less forceful message may increase
conservative consumers’ compliance with government regulations, this study further
supports our reactance-based account.
Studies
Study 1
In this study it was tested whether consumers’ actual behavior is influenced after a law change that
gives law enforcement officials the authority to fine drivers who use their mobile phones while
driving. They predict that the countries with greater conservative population will either experience a
lower decrease in consumers’ mobile phone usage than countries with lower conservative
population, or an increase in consumers’ mobile phone usage from the period before the law was
enacted.
They confirmed their conjecture that countries that are populated with more conservatives
(relative to liberals) are more likely to go counter to an enacted law if the law restricts their
freedom. Overall, the natural experiment demonstrates the effect in a real-life setting.
However, it is limited in terms of revealing the underlying mechanisms driving the effect.
Study 2
First, they seek to replicate the results from Study 1 in a controlled experimental setting. Second,
they seek to investigate the moderating role of trait-reactance in the behavior exhibited by liberals
and conservatives when they encounter a government regulation. If reactance is the underlying
factor that causes conservatives to react negatively to government regulations, then conservatives
with high (vs. low) trait-reactance should be more likely to act counter to the imposed government
regulations. Third, they examine whether conservatives’ negative reactions to government
regulations stem from their thoughts about the implications of such regulations. Specifically,
conservatives may infer that if the government, which has the ability to regulate markets, has the
intention to restrict people’s behavior in a consumption domain, it may extend its influence further
in the future, leading to more restrictions. Finally, they aim to empirically rule out the possibility that
the effect is dependent on party leadership. To that end, they manipulated the type of the regulation
such that the regulation comes from either the state or federal government.
Independent variables: government, political ideology
Dependent variable: mobile phone usage intention
Moderator: trait reactance
Mediator: threat to freedom based on implication beliefs
Analysis: regression analysis
, Results suggest that conservatives’ reactions to government regulations do not stem from
concerns that the democratic party runs the government; rather, conservative consumers
may be more concerned about government interventions, coming from either federal or
state governments, against personal freedom. They found as well that a significant but
modest correlation between trait-reactance and political ideology, suggesting that as
conservatism increased so did trait reactance. This correlation is in line with our theory
suggesting that conservatives are more sensitive to threats to freedom; thus, they are also
more likely to be high in trait reactance. For those who are very low in reactance, they
observed a negative effect of political ideology such that mobile phone usage intentions
were lower for conservatives. Further, for those who are relatively high in reactance, they
observed a positive effect of political ideology on mobile phone usage intentions, indicating
that conservatism increases mobile phone usage intentions of those who are high in
reactance. They confirmed as well that threat to freedom has a mediating role.
Study 3
First, they investigate the role of political ideology in consumers’ reactions to warning labels that are
designed by a governmental agency (i.e., the FDA) as compared with labels designed by companies.
They expect that explicitly stating the source of the warning label as a governmental agency (i.e., the
FDA) leads to an effect opposite to the one intended by the warning label among conservative
consumers. When the source of the warning label is a company, however, we expect this effect to be
attenuated such that conservatives’ reaction to the warning label will not be different from that of
liberals. Second, they examine the role of a sense of threat in this study. Specifically, if the effect
observed in the previous studies is based on reactance, then a sense of threat to freedom should
mediate the interaction effect of political ideology and source on purchase intentions as threat to
freedom is a hallmark of reactance.
Independent variables: source and political ideology
Dependent variable: purchase intention
Mediator: threat to freedom
Analysis: regression analysis
Building on findings from Studies 1 and 2 showing that consumption regulations from the
government are less likely to change conservatives’ behavior, findings from Study 3
demonstrate that labels that warn the consumers about food unhealthiness may result in an
increase in conservatives’ purchase likelihood of an unhealthy product. These findings
suggest that when the government is associated with a nutrition-related warning label,
conservative consumers may act counter to what labels recommend them to do. Further-
more, we find that the reason conservatives intend to act counter to the message of the
warning label when the FDA is the source of the warning label is that they perceive higher
threat in this condition.
Study 4
First, they aim to show a simple way for the FDA to effectively nudge consumers with
conservative political ideology toward behaving in line with its message. To that end, they
manipulate the message by altering one word in the message: the message is presented either as
a warning or as a notification. Second, they seek to extend the results obtained in our previous
studies to a different domain, namely, e-cigarette smoking.
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