Does a Broken Heart Lead to an Empty Wallet? Social Exclusion Affects Impulsive Spending

Impulse purchases are made spontaneously, without deliberation, and without regard for the consequences of making the purchase (Rook 1987). Hoch and Loewenstein (1991) argued that the decision to purchase is determined by 2 factors: The desire to purchase and the amount of willpower one has to overcome this desire. When the urge to purchase becomes stronger than the amount of willpower, purchasing becomes more likely. Recently, Vohs and Faber (in press) demonstrated that people with a reduced capacity to exert self-control are more likely to spend money impulsively. That is, participants who engaged in prior acts of self-control, and therefore had a reduced capacity to exert self-FIGURE Extended Abstract As an important construct in consumer research, prior knowledge has garnered researchers’ attention for more than two decades. Previous research traditionally focuses on prior knowledge’s impact on consumers’ information search, information processing and learning behaviors. Very few studies (e.g. Roehm and Sternthal 2001) have directly explored the role of prior knowledge in advertisement evaluation. The attempted contribution of this research is to broaden our understanding in this area by investigating the processes by which knowledge has its impact on consumers’ evaluation of advertising messages. The angle from which this study looks at prior knowledge is different from past research in which knowledge is often operationalized as a dichotomous variable (i.e. high vs. low or objective vs. subjective). This study distinguishes itself by focusing on knowledge accessibility and its applicability in judgment. Advertising messages are usually seen or heard by consumers for a very brief period of time. It is unlikely that consumers will mull over their stored knowledge before forming impressions of the ads. In these circumstances, the accessible knowledge ought to play a major role in making judgments. What remains unclear is the interaction between the accessible knowledge and the salient features of the messages to which they attend. Higgins proposes that the relation between the stored knowledge and stimulus information depends on whether the perceivers have a priori expectancies or goals. When expectancies or goals are absent, only those salient features of the stimulus that match stored knowledge are relevant. When expectancies or goals are present, “both features that match and features mismatch stored knowledge are relevant” (p.137). Armed with the popular persuasion models such as Elaboration Likelihood Model (Petty and Cacioppo 1986), I translate Higgins’ proposition into the following research hypothesis: (1) message processing motivation is low, consumers will give more positive evaluations to the advertisement whose salient feature matches their accessible knowledge about the advertised product; (2) when message processing motivation is high, consumers will not rely on their accessible knowledge to make judgments. There will be no significant difference between the evaluations of matched and mismatched advertisements. A 2 (processing motivation: low vs. high) x 3 (knowledge accessibility: match vs. mismatch vs. control) between-subjects laboratory experiment was conducted to test the research hypothesis. In the experiment, student subjects’ prior knowledge about a specific product feature was made accessible by a priming task. A no-prime control condition was also included. After the priming, subjects were presented with a print newsletter that contains the focal advertisement. Subjects’ processing motivation was manipulated by instructing them either to produce a detailed evaluation (high motivation condition) or to provide reading time estimation (low motivation condition). The results confirmed the hypothesis. Under the low processing motivation condition, matched ads received more favorable evaluations and the mismatched ads were judged worse than those in the no-prime control condition. Under the high processing motivation condition, no significant difference was found across all conditions. A second study is proposed to test the external validity of the findings from the first study and to provide managerial implications of this research to marketing practitioners.