When our hopes are threatened, we often turn to the marketplace for help. Cant fit into the gorgeous outfit you bought for your high school reunion" Trying to get pregnant" Want a bigger house but afraid you cant afford it" A new study by researchers from University of Southern California argues that in situations like these, consumers are susceptible to motivated reasoning. We believe what we want to believe about products that promise to help even if the arguments dont come from credible sources.
Hope is threatened when people lose confidence that what they yearn for is possible, and this loss may result in a range of seemingly irrational behavior. Specifically, consumers interested in products that purport to enable goal-attainment will:
- Search for information from product-favorable information sources (including advertisements) - Regard favorable information as more credible - Be less discriminating about low-credibility message arguments - Be more likely to judge the product as effective
In the August issue of the Journal of Consumer Research, USC researchers Deborah J. MacInnis (Professor of Business Administration and Vice Dean of Research), David W. Stewart (Professor of Marketing and Chair, Dept. of Marketing), and their late colleague Gustavo De Mello outline three studies that demonstrate these phenomena.
For example, the first experiment asked ninety-nine undergraduates in the midst of mid-term exams to participate in a purportedly unrelated study conducted by the Office of Student Affairs, asking students to report on a variety of things, including how confident they felt about getting good grades.
The students were then asked to participate in an unrelated study that asked them to evaluate a new product a memory booster. They were given background information from a manufacturers brochure (a favorable source) or from a newspaper article (an objective source), which they could access by cl
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Contact: Suzanne Wu
swu@press.uchicago.edu
773-834-0386
University of Chicago Press Journals
12-Jul-2007