The Impact Of Social Crowding On Consumers' Boundary Preferences And Its Mechanis

The world’s population continues to grow,and the problem of social crowding is becoming increasingly prominent.As a country with the largest population in the world,China has a particularly serious problem of social crowding.The widespread phenomenon of social crowding has an impact on consumers.Consumers’ perception of crowding in the environment will affect consumers’ preference for products.Boundary preference refers to how much consumers like the boundary.Boundary as a widespread but difficult to perceive business elements.The boundary has an important impact on consumption decisions.Previous studies have found that the spatial crowding brought by the disordered physical environment can affect consumers’ boundary preference.And many of people’s consumption decisions are made in the presence of others.So what kind of impact will social crowding caused by the increase in the number of people in the environment affect consumers’ boundary preferences?Previous studies have shown that social crowding threatens consumers’ sense of control,and consumers in crowded environments make various compensatory behaviors to reduce this threat.The emerging compensatory control theory proposes that people will deal reduced control with a new strategy,nonspecific structure affirmation.Boundaries are an important way of establishing order and structure in an environment,filling the consumer’s sense of control.Therefore,according to the compensatory control theory,this paper explores the effect of social crowding on consumers’ boundary preference and its mechanism.This article refers to previous research methods and recruits a total of 416 effective participants online and offline.Through the joint manipulation of pictures and text titles,the environment of the participants was manipulated to explore the influence and mechanism of social crowding on consumerss boundary preferences.And the following conclusions were obtained through three experiments:(1)Social crowding affects consumers’ preference for tangible boundaries,and participants in the socially crowded group prefer products with simpler boundaries than those in the non-socially crowded group.(2)Social crowding did not affect consumers’ preference for intangible boundaries,and there was no significant difference in the choice of intangible boundaries between participants in the social crowding group and those in the non-social crowding group.(3)Sense of control plays a mediating role in the effect of social crowding on consumers’ preference for tangible boundaries.