The moderating role of dialecticism in consumer responses to product information

Abstract

We show that consumers high in dialecticism—the tolerance of contradictions and the expectations of change (Peng & Nisbett, 1999)—respond differently than low‐dialecticism consumers to messages that have purely positive, mixed, or purely negative information. We find first that for low dialectics, felt ambivalence—and discomfort—is greater for mixed information messages than for negative or positive information. For high dialectics, however, mixed information leads to high felt ambivalence, but not to high discomfort. When given univalent positive or negative information messages, high dialectics have more thoughts about information opposite in valence to that presented, when presented with negative information messages. As a result, for high dialectics, univalent negative information produces the same high felt ambivalence, and even greater discomfort, than do mixed information messages. Through these non‐parallel effects, we show that the relationship between felt ambivalence and discomfort is itself moderated by dialecticism. Through three experiments and using a novel manipulation of dialecticism, we replicate and generalize these effects and provide process evidence.

“Every coin has two sides”: The effects of dialectical thinking and attitudinal ambivalence on psychological discomfort and consumer choice

“…We then examined the simple effect of ambivalence on psychological discomfort. For nondialectical thinkers, bivalent evaluations induced more discomfort than positive evaluations did ( p = .05), a result in line with the ambivalence literature (van Harreveld et al, 2009; Wang et al, 2016). For dialectical thinkers, positive evaluations led to more discomfort than bivalent evaluations did, but the difference was not statistically significant ( p = .136).…”

“…According to Hogarth (1981), judgment is noncommittal, but choice entails commitment to one side of the bivalent evaluations. The different contexts may well explain the differences between our study and Wang et al's (2016). Wang et al (2016) find that nondialectical thinkers experience more discomfort when they are confronted only with positive evaluations than when they are confronted with bivalent evaluations, and that dialectical thinkers do not experience this result.…”

“…To date, there is limited research examining the effect of dialectical thinking on consumers' affective and behavioral responses as a function of varying levels of ambivalence. The closest work is by Wang et al (2016), who examine the moderating role of dialectical thinking on consumers' affective reactions to positive only, mixed, and negative only product information. Our research differs from, and thus extends, their work in the following ways.…”

“…Although dialectical thinking was first proposed to reflect differences in reasoning about contradiction between Westerners and Easterners (Peng & Nisbett, 1999), subsequent studies have shown that dialectical thinking can be primed (Alter & Kwan, 2009; Monga & John, 2008; Spencer‐Rodgers et al, 2004; Wang et al, 2016). Thus, we primed dialectical thinking in all four studies, with the priming disguised as a reasoning exercise.…”

Dialectical mind can be sweet toward crisis‐associated products/brands

“…Furthermore, dialectical thinking is proposed to be embedded in external situation (Zhang et al., ). Although dialectical thinking has been acknowledged as cultural related, consumers in the same culture are open to be dialectical or nondialectical depending on specific situations (Wang et al., ). Note that congruity effect reported in previous research involves the congruity of solid cultural cues such as product types and names (Torelli, & Ahluwalia, ).…”