Effects of Communicating Emotions on Consumer Perceptions of Fairness

One way consumers deal with their perceptions of having been unfairly treated by a company is to express how they feel about it. Does this help or hurt the company? How about the perceptions of those who hear or read those emotional expressions? We address these questions to show that expressing emotions alleviates perceived unfairness but observing the emotional expressions ofothers exacerbates it. Expressing emotions induces expressers to become aware of their emotionsto make appropriate adjustments to the initial anchor of unfairness, whereas observing deprivesobservers of such opportunity but provides more evidence to strengthen the initial unfairness.The effect of emotion-focused expression is moderated by the perceived responsibility of theexpression receiver and the effect of observation is moderated by the observer's perceivedsimilarity to the source. Due to differences in how expression and observation operate, we findan interesting asymmetry. While expressing emotions and facts operate in the same direction on fairness perceptions, observing the expression of emotions works in a direction opposite toobserving the expression of facts.