The Reaction Of Consumers To Others’ Assessments Under Different Social Distances

There are significant differences when consumers comprehend the comments of escortsor strangers under shopping circumstance. Many studies have found that individuals withdifferent types of regulatory focus have different levels of abstraction on psychologicalrepresentation of cognitive objects, namely different construal levels.Customers withpromotion orientation adopt high construal level while those with prevention orientationadopt the low.The difference of construal level between individual and object relates to thesocial distance when individual perceive the object. Distant Customers adopt high construallevel and close consumers adopt the low construal level. In addition, different properties ofthe comment affect the consumers differently. Extreme positive and negative informationinfluences the consumers more significantly than neutral information does.This paper studiesthe reaction of consumers who are of different types of regulatory focus to others’assessments under different social distances.The experiment adopted the method of2(Regulatory Focus: promotion orientation VSprevention orientation) x2(Social Distance: social distance VS social close) x2(Evaluationattribute: positive VS negative). Four kinds of questionnaires: A1means distant others withpositive comment、A2means distant others with negative comment、B1means close otherswith positive comment、B2means close others with negative comment, were giving out tointerviewees randomly. Firstly, they filled out regulatory focus questionnaire, through thegrades of which they were divided into two groups: the promotion orientation and preventionorientation.Secondly, they have to read the situation passages to answer questions. AfterANOVA of factorial design and simple effects analysis, the results turn out that consumerswith promotion orientation are more willing to accept the assessments from distant others andconsumers with prevention orientation the assessments from close others. Given the positiveand negative property of the comments, it is find that promotion oriented consumers tend toaccept positive assessments from distant others, while prevention oriented consumers tend toaccept negative assessments from close others.