Let the Comments Fly: The Effects of Flying Commentary Presentation on Consumer Judgment

Affect often influences consumers’ evaluative judgment. Not much is known about whether and how affect may play a role in human-computer interaction. This research intends to empirically evaluate an affect-eliciting design feature (i.e., danmaku commentary presentation), and examine its effects on consumers’ evaluative judgment. Drawing on the affective response model, we hypothesize that danmaku (vs. separate) commentary presentation system may elicit more pleasant and exciting video watching experience, which in turn influence consumers’ judgmental evaluations. We further investigate whether the impact of commentary presentation systems on evaluative judgment may be contingent upon sentiment divergence of comments, consumer involvement and consumer metamotivational state. We describe an experiment design for testing the hypotheses, and discuss the potential theoretical and practical implications of this study.