Exploring consumer evaluations in social media: The role of psychological distance between company and consumer

Abstract While social media has emerged as a key source of information used by consumers in their attitude formation, whether and how companies build a psychological distance with customers has not been thoroughly examined. This study investigates the influence of psychological distance on consumer evaluations of a company and its products when the company's behavior in social media is ambivalent in terms of morality or competence. In two experiments, the findings indicate that consumer evaluations vary as a function of types of ambivalent behavior (morality vs. competence) of a company and psychological distance between consumers and the company. These findings not only advance the understanding of the role of psychological distance in consumers' company evaluations but also offer implications regarding strategies that organizations can employ to manage their public relations by using social media.

[1]  Ingoo Han,et al.  Factors influencing information distortion in online deliberations: The effects of informational characteristics and regulatory focus , 2013, Comput. Hum. Behav..

[2]  C. Judd,et al.  Fundamental dimensions of social judgment: understanding the relations between judgments of competence and warmth. , 2005, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[3]  Peter A. Dacin,et al.  The Company and the Product: Corporate Associations and Consumer Product Responses , 1997 .

[4]  Amalia Triantafillidou,et al.  The role of consumer ethical beliefs in product-harm crises , 2011 .

[5]  Sunghun Chung,et al.  Effects of social and temporal distance on evaluation of corporate ambivalent behavior , 2013 .

[6]  M. Conner,et al.  Ambivalence and Attitudes , 2002 .

[7]  Huimin Xu,et al.  It is nice to be important, but it is more important to be nice: Country-of-origin's perceived warmth in product failures , 2013 .

[8]  Jinhong Xie,et al.  Effects of Social and Temporal Distance on Consumers' Responses to Peer Recommendations , 2010 .

[9]  Patrick Poon,et al.  Corporate Ability and Corporate Social Responsibility in a Developing Country: The Role of Product Involvement , 2012 .

[10]  Y. Trope,et al.  The role of feasibility and desirability considerations in near and distant future decisions: A test of temporal construal theory. , 1998 .

[11]  Y. Trope,et al.  The effect of temporal distance on level of mental construal. , 2002 .

[12]  Danit Ein-Gar,et al.  Giving from a distance: Putting the charitable organization at the center of the donation appeal , 2013 .

[13]  Boon-Ooi Lee,et al.  Ambivalence over emotional expression and symptom attribution are associated with self‐reported somatic symptoms in Singaporean school adolescents , 2013 .

[14]  Grahame R. Dowling,et al.  Developing your company image into a corporate asset , 1993 .

[15]  Yaacov Trope,et al.  Judging near and distant virtue and vice. , 2008, Journal of experimental social psychology.

[16]  Linda Steg,et al.  Morality and Prosocial Behavior: The Role of Awareness, Responsibility, and Norms in the Norm Activation Model , 2009, The Journal of social psychology.

[17]  J. J. Cronin,et al.  Removing the contextual lens: A multinational, multi-setting comparison of service evaluation models , 2005 .

[18]  Bogdan Wojciszke,et al.  On the Dominance of Moral Categories in Impression Formation , 1998 .

[19]  G. Peeters,et al.  From good and bad to can and must: subjective necessity of acts associated with positively and negatively valued stimuli , 2002 .

[20]  Wim B. G. Liebrand,et al.  Might over morality: Social values and the perception of other players in experimental games , 1986 .

[21]  Minette E. Drumwright,et al.  Company Advertising with a Social Dimension: The Role of Noneconomic Criteria , 1996 .

[22]  Regina M. Hechanova,et al.  Culture masquerading, identity and organizational commitment , 2012 .

[23]  R. Batra,et al.  When Corporate Image Affects Product Evaluations: The Moderating Role of Perceived Risk , 2004 .

[24]  John B. Unipan,et al.  Green Buying: The Influence of Environmental Concern on Consumer Behavior , 1997 .

[25]  M. Sujan,et al.  Managing Consumer Uncertainty in the Adoption of New Products: Temporal Distance and Mental Simulation , 2008 .

[26]  Bogdan Wojciszke,et al.  Multiple meanings of behavior: Construing actions in terms of competence or morality. , 1994 .

[27]  Y. Trope,et al.  Construal Levels and Psychological Distance: Effects on Representation, Prediction, Evaluation, and Behavior. , 2007, Journal of consumer psychology : the official journal of the Society for Consumer Psychology.

[28]  Chin-Lan Huang,et al.  Benefitting from a different perspective: The effect of a complementary matching of psychological distance and habitual perspective on emotion regulation , 2012 .

[29]  Kristopher J Preacher,et al.  Asymptotic and resampling strategies for assessing and comparing indirect effects in multiple mediator models , 2008, Behavior research methods.

[30]  U. Neisser,et al.  Point of view in personal memories , 1983, Cognitive Psychology.

[31]  Colin Camerer,et al.  Reputation and corporate strategy: A review of recent theory and applications , 1988 .

[32]  Seymour Rosenberg,et al.  Structural Representations of Implicit Personality Theory1 , 1972 .

[33]  Wim B. G. Liebrand,et al.  Role of interdependence structure, individual value orientation, and another's strategy in social decision making: a transformational analysis , 1988 .

[34]  Y. Trope,et al.  Interpersonal Similarity as a Social Distance Dimension: Implications for Perception of Others' Actions. , 2008, Journal of experimental social psychology.

[35]  N. Dawar,et al.  Corporate social responsibility and consumers' attributions and brand evaluations in a product–harm crisis , 2004 .

[36]  Manoj Thomas,et al.  Psychological Distance and Subjective Experience: How Distancing Reduces the Feeling of Difficulty , 2011 .

[37]  S. Grappi,et al.  Company Post-Crisis Communication Strategies and the Psychological Mechanism Underlying Consumer Reactions , 2015 .

[38]  Thomas E. Mitchell,et al.  Actor-observer differences in attributions to morality , 1985 .

[39]  R. Hill,et al.  The impact of perceived corporate social responsibility on consumer behavior , 2006 .

[40]  Guido Berens,et al.  Corporate Associations and Consumer Product Responses: The Moderating Role of Corporate Brand Dominance , 2005 .

[41]  John G. Lynch,et al.  Reconsidering Baron and Kenny: Myths and Truths about Mediation Analysis , 2010 .

[42]  Carolyn Yoon,et al.  Perceived covariation among the features of ingroup and outgroup members: The outgroup covariation effect. , 1996 .

[43]  Paul A. M. Van Lange,et al.  Social Value Orientations and Impressions of Partner's Honesty and Intelligence: A Test of the Might Versus Morality Effect , 1994 .

[44]  Meng Zhang,et al.  Effects of Temporal and Social Distance on Consumer Evaluations , 2008 .

[45]  Y. Trope,et al.  The influence of abstract and concrete mindsets on anticipating and guiding others' self-regulatory efforts ☆ , 2004 .

[46]  W. Mischel,et al.  The personality of familiar and significant people: the lay perceiver as a social-cognitive theorist. , 2001, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[47]  Nira Liberman,et al.  Distancing from experienced self: how global-versus-local perception affects estimation of psychological distance. , 2009, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[48]  Dolf Zillmann,et al.  Company Affiliation and Communicative Ability: How Perceived Organizational Ties Influence Source Persuasiveness in a Company-Negative News Environment , 2002 .

[49]  Mark Conner,et al.  Moderator effects of attitudinal ambivalence on attitude-behaviour relationships , 2002 .

[50]  Thomas Gilovich,et al.  Effect of Memory Perspective on Retrospective Causal Attributions , 1989 .

[51]  P. S. Vivekananthan,et al.  A multidimensional approach to the structure of personality impressions. , 1968, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[52]  Tammo H. A. Bijmolt,et al.  Generating Global Brand Equity Through Corporate Social Responsibility to Key Stakeholders , 2011 .