{"title":"Conspiracy Beliefs and Consumption: The Role of Scientific Literacy","authors":"Nathan Allred, Lisa E Bolton","doi":"10.1093/jcr/ucae024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jcr/ucae024","url":null,"abstract":"Conspiracy theories pose risks to consumers, businesses, and society. The present research investigates the role of scientific literacy in a variety of conspiracy beliefs with implications for consumer well-being and sustainability (e.g., regarding COVID-19, GMOs and climate change). In contrast to the mixed effects of education in prior work, we find that scientific literacy undermines conspiracy beliefs and, in turn, conspiracy-related behaviors. This finding is explained by people’s ability to use two dimensions of scientific literacy—scientific knowledge and reasoning—to accurately assess conspiracy evidence. For robustness, we assess scientific literacy through both measurement and manipulation (ie, interventions), identify two moderators (evidence strength and narration) that attenuate the effect, and further validate our theorizing using national and international datasets (regarding COVID-19 vaccination and google search, respectively). We discuss the implications of our findings for consumers, companies, nonprofit organizations, and governments.","PeriodicalId":15555,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Consumer Research","volume":"20 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":7.2,"publicationDate":"2024-04-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140583745","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Price Partitioning of Socio-Moral Surcharges","authors":"Shreyans Goenka, Rajesh Bagchi","doi":"10.1093/jcr/ucae026","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jcr/ucae026","url":null,"abstract":"Many companies are levying mandatory surcharges on products to raise funds for socio-moral causes (e.g., carbon-offset, living-wage, fair-trade, and sustainability surcharges). Should these surcharges be presented separately from the product price (ie, partitioned pricing) or combined with the product price (ie, all-inclusive pricing)? This research argues that partitioned pricing for socio-moral surcharges can backfire. When socio-moral surcharges are partitioned, consumers feel that the company is avoiding its own responsibility towards the cause, reducing intrinsic corporate social responsibility (CSR) attributions and consequently leading to adverse consumer reactions. This theorization is specific to surcharges attached to socio-moral causes; the effects reverse for non-socio-moral surcharges. Further, we document three ways via which firms can alter consumer beliefs and attenuate negative reactions. These include approaches that signal that the firm is not seeking reputational benefits, that the firm is not avoiding responsibility, and by shifting consumers’ focus from the costs they have to bear to the benefits they accrue. Hence, this research presents implications for managers and policymakers seeking to incorporate socio-moral surcharges into product prices while mitigating consumer backlash.","PeriodicalId":15555,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Consumer Research","volume":"65 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":7.2,"publicationDate":"2024-04-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140583742","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Andreas Chatzidakis, Giana M Eckhardt, Katharina C Husemann
{"title":"The Cumulative Effects of Marketized Care","authors":"Andreas Chatzidakis, Giana M Eckhardt, Katharina C Husemann","doi":"10.1093/jcr/ucae025","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jcr/ucae025","url":null,"abstract":"Care is increasingly marketized. Previous marketing and consumer research has focused on specific tensions underlying marketized care provision and the ways in which consumers navigate them. In contrast, this conceptual paper draws on interdisciplinary research on care to develop a cumulative understanding of marketized care, that is, based on those effects that build up over time when a critical mass of consumers routinely addresses care needs via markets. Defining marketized care as attending to the welfare needs of human and nonhuman others through the market, we identify four negative cumulative effects: individuating effects on consumer subjectivities, alienating effects on care relationships, responsibilizing effects on consumers as opposed to other institutional actors of care provision, and exploitative effects generated in global care and supply chains. We also outline four principles that can mitigate these effects: interdependent consumer autonomy, affective reconnections, proportionate responsibilization and market reconfiguration. Our conceptualization moves the literature on marketized care forward by outlining its cumulative nature as well as offering potential solutions that are neither demonizing nor celebratory of markets. In doing so we offer a series of generative insights for research on marketized care that contribute to addressing collective human and nonhuman flourishing.","PeriodicalId":15555,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Consumer Research","volume":"48 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":7.2,"publicationDate":"2024-04-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140583741","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Olivier Sibai, Marius K Luedicke, Kristine de Valck
{"title":"Why Online Consumption Communities Brutalize","authors":"Olivier Sibai, Marius K Luedicke, Kristine de Valck","doi":"10.1093/jcr/ucae022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jcr/ucae022","url":null,"abstract":"Consumers who socialize in online consumption communities sometimes become alarmingly hostile, toxic, and otherwise verbally violent toward one another—a phenomenon known in sociology as brutalization. Research indicates that short-lived, situational outbursts of verbal violence—such as gross insults, harassment, or trolling—are common in online consumption contexts. However, it does not explain why such behaviors sometimes become endemic, turning entire communities into toxic social spaces. To address this question, the authors studied 18 years of interactions in an online electronic dance music community. Their interpretive analysis reveals three constellations of interacting, mutually reinforcing, forms of direct, structural, and cultural violence—sadistic entertainment, clan warfare, and popular justice—that fuel community brutalization in distinct ways. This article introduces these brutalization constellations, substantiates them with empirical data, and discusses their implications for theories of violence in consumption communities as well as the wider social media sphere.","PeriodicalId":15555,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Consumer Research","volume":"133 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":7.2,"publicationDate":"2024-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140583833","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Competent or Sad Blue? Lively or Aggressive Red? Why, How, and When Background Color Shapes the Meanings of Logo Hues","authors":"Franck Celhay, Jonathan Luffarelli","doi":"10.1093/jcr/ucae019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jcr/ucae019","url":null,"abstract":"Why, how, and when can logos with a blue positive space communicate competence versus sadness? Why, how, and when might logos with a red positive space evoke impressions of liveliness versus aggressiveness? As the current research establishes, a black background strengthens the negative meanings associated with the hue of a logo’s positive space and weakens its positive meanings. Conversely, a white background strengthens its positive meanings and weakens its negative meanings. These automatic effects occur because the hue of the positive space interacts with the color of the negative space to determine whether logos communicate positive or negative brand impressions more vividly. These effects are broadly applicable to both well-known and unknown brands, yet they are attenuated for meaningful logos and filled-frame logos. With these novel findings, this article identifies specific factors that can alter the meanings of logo hues, provides a theoretical lens for understanding the interplay of the background color and the hue of the positive space, and offers guidelines for crafting effective logos. This article also reveals which brands can benefit most from conveying negative impressions through their logos: Logos with a black (white) background enhance evaluations of brands that possess negatively (positively) valenced personality traits.","PeriodicalId":15555,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Consumer Research","volume":"2 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":7.2,"publicationDate":"2024-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140202938","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Market Dynamics of Collective Ignorance and Spiraling Risk","authors":"Léna Pellandini-Simányi, Michelle Barnhart","doi":"10.1093/jcr/ucae018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jcr/ucae018","url":null,"abstract":"In some markets, offerings become riskier over time as producers introduce new versions that are more affordable due to their higher risk. Existing theories suggest consumers adopt riskier versions either because they become more risk tolerant or they trade higher risk for lower price—both of which presume consumers know the risks. We reveal a third explanation: evolving market dynamics that increasingly encourage consumer inattention to risk and produce “collective ignorance.” We identify social, cultural, and institutional drivers of collective inattention and propose a three-stage model of development of collective ignorance by analyzing the case of risk buildup in the Hungarian mortgage market. Data include interviews and institutional documents. Initially, producers offer low risk products, and social, cultural, and institutional factors encourage attention to risk. Consumers attentive to and capable of assessing risk become early adopters. Over time, increasing adoption and changes in market factors divert consumers’ attention from risk, shifting it to price. Under insufficient regulation, risk escalates: producers repeatedly cut price by offering increasingly risky products, while rising collective ignorance leads even risk-averse consumers to adopt them. We offer theoretical contributions to research on the social construction of risk, the attitude-behavior gap, and neoliberal responsibilization.","PeriodicalId":15555,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Consumer Research","volume":"5 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":7.2,"publicationDate":"2024-03-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140155832","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Stigma Resistance through Body-in-Practice: Embodying Pride through Creative Mastery","authors":"Rohan Venkatraman, Julie L Ozanne, Erica Coslor","doi":"10.1093/jcr/ucae015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jcr/ucae015","url":null,"abstract":"Stigma, as a process of shame, fosters social exclusion and diminishes bodily competences. Thus, stigmatized consumers often turn to the marketplace for respite. Based on an ethnographic study of drag artists, this study proposes a new understanding of the body that emerges from the mastery of creative consumption practices to combat shame. We theorize a novel “body-in-practice” framework to examine how consumers transform from an imagined persona to an accomplished body to embody pride. Six novel stigma resistance strategies emerged—experimenting, guarding, risk-taking, spatial reconfiguring, self-affirming, and integrating. Body-in-practice thus explains how shame weakens, pride strengthens, emotions stabilize, and self-confidence grows. This research contributes by explaining the hard work of identity repair, exploring stigma resistance across safe and hostile social spaces, and highlighting the emancipatory potential of embodied mastery.","PeriodicalId":15555,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Consumer Research","volume":"36 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":7.2,"publicationDate":"2024-02-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139953612","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Easy [TQ1]to Be Selfish: When and Why is One Individual as Influential as Multiple Individuals","authors":"Zheshuai Yang, Yan Zhang","doi":"10.1093/jcr/ucae006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jcr/ucae006","url":null,"abstract":"Past research on social influence finds that, all else being equal, a group of people engaged in a particular behavior is generally more influential than a single individual in inspiring others to adopt that behavior. The current research challenges this seemingly intuitive idea by showing that its validity depends on whether the focal behavior is selfish. Seven experiments show that while multiple people are indeed more influential than a single individual in encouraging unselfish behavior, a single individual can be just as influential as multiple people in encouraging selfish behavior. We present evidence that this phenomenon occurs because people generally have a preference for the selfish option and seek justification for their actions. Selfish behavior, whether exhibited by a single individual or a group of people, provides a convenient justification consistent with their preference for selfish behavior. When it comes to unselfish behavior, however, a larger group of influencers is required to counteract their self-benefiting tendencies. Supporting this mechanism, the effect is reversed when people have a pre-existing preference for unselfishness or when selfish behavior is difficult to justify.","PeriodicalId":15555,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Consumer Research","volume":"155-156 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":7.2,"publicationDate":"2024-01-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139656749","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Michael B Beverland, Karen V Fernandez, Giana M Eckhardt
{"title":"Consumer Work and Agency in the Analog Revival","authors":"Michael B Beverland, Karen V Fernandez, Giana M Eckhardt","doi":"10.1093/jcr/ucae003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jcr/ucae003","url":null,"abstract":"Why do consumers choose difficult analog technologies over their labor-saving digital counterparts? Through ethnographic investigations of three once defunct analog technologies that have experienced a resurgence (vinyl music, film photography and analog synthesizers), we explore how the act of consumer work enables consumers to experience shifting dimensions of agency. We utilize the theoretical lens of serious leisure to introduce a four-stage work process (novice, apprentice, craft and design) in which the experience of agency is dependent on the shifting relations between user, object, and context. The four stages are cumulative and conjunctive, representing the development of skills towards mastery while also being connected via three transition mechanisms (contextualization, schematization, and hypothesization) that address agency–alienation tensions. The transition through these mechanisms is necessary to sustain emotional engagement in consumer work. Our contribution lies in demonstrating the myriad of ways in which consumer work as serious leisure generates different experiences of agency and alienation and the ways in which consumers can sustain engagement in their work.","PeriodicalId":15555,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Consumer Research","volume":"68 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":7.2,"publicationDate":"2024-01-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139516611","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Chihling Liu, Robert V Kozinets, Anthony Patterson, Xin Zhao
{"title":"Gift Giving in Enduring Dyadic Relationships: The Micropolitics of Mother-Daughter Gift Exchange","authors":"Chihling Liu, Robert V Kozinets, Anthony Patterson, Xin Zhao","doi":"10.1093/jcr/ucae002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jcr/ucae002","url":null,"abstract":"This paper investigates the dynamics of long-term gift exchange between British mothers and their adult daughters, delving into the processes behind dyadic gift-giving. Through 54 comprehensive interviews, we elaborate the micropolitics that characterize these dynamics. Micropolitics refers to the subtle, everyday interactions, including gift exchange, that shape the ongoing negotiation of roles and the management of conflict or consensus within relationships. The study uncovers how these micropolitics manifest through four distinct processes of gift exchange: confirming, endorsing, connoting, and commanding. Gifts emerge as key instruments in this negotiation, serving as a medium for the reciprocal regulation of role behavior concerning gender, identity, and both endo-dyadic (within the dyad) and exo-dyadic (outside the dyad) roles. In contrast to previous research that adopts a synchronic (snapshot) approach to gift-giving, our diachronic (over time) perspective emphasizes how power dynamics, intent, and identity politics evolve to sustain and transform relationships. Our findings illustrate the important communicative and power-laden processes of gift exchange in enduring relations, explaining why even unwanted gifts can have significant bonding value. Our study offers fresh perspectives on the continuous evolution of relationship and role dynamics, as viewed through the practices of gift exchange.","PeriodicalId":15555,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Consumer Research","volume":"69 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":7.2,"publicationDate":"2024-01-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139415121","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}