Animosity, preference conflict and consumption context in an international crisis: a normative influence perspective

What is it about?

Consumption context (e.g., in public vs. in private) has been largely neglected in the animosity literature. This research indicates that such an omission can be attributed to a major limitation – failure to consider social influence in conventional animosity research. To address this limitation, this research constitutes two interrelated parts: (a) investigating how normative influences, including value- expressive and utilitarian influences, shape consumers’ animosity attitudes and purchase intentions; (b) separating consumption context into purchase (online vs. offline) and usage (private vs. public) contexts, and examining under the condition of preference conflict, how consumption contexts with different degrees of behavioral exposure affect purchase decisions. This study focuses on the condition of an international crisis (as opposed to stable animosity), in which normative pressure is stronger, and preference conflict is more likely. One pretest, one survey, and one experiment were conducted to empirically validate the proposed research model. The results support the hypotheses.

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