Negativity Bias Effect in Helpfulness Perception of Word-of-Mouths: the Influence of Concreteness and Emotion

Abstract

Abstract. Word-of-mouth (WOM) is a powerful information resource for consumers to judge a product or service. WOM has persuasive power when audiences regard it as helpful. There is a psychological phenomenon, called the negativity bias, in which negative WOMs are usually regarded as more helpful than positive ones. However, not all previous studies supported the existence of negativity bias. This paper examines the negativity bias effect of WOM and explores the moderating effect of length and emotional content on the helpfulness perception of WOM. This study adopted experimental designs of 2 (positive/negative WOMs) X 2 (long/short WOMs) X 2 (WOMs with strong emotion/weak emotion) of 139 subjects. The empirical survey results reveal that length and emotional content of WOMs are influential factors for helpfulness perception of WOMs. Moreover, both length content and emotional content of WOMs also moderate the negativity bias effect of helpfulness perception. The negativity bias effect appears when WOMs are concrete and emotional. Keywords: Word-of-Mouths · Negativity bias effect · Product review IntroductionDuring the purchase decision-making process, the customers search for information about products/services. The information can be provided by the firms (advertising) as well as by other consumers (Word-of-mouths, WOMs). Literatures advocate that WOM is more persuasive than traditional advertising [1][2][3]. People tend to accept the recommendations when the message is from WOMs of unbiased authority, and reject the advertising claim when they believe the message is a sales tool rather than information and guidance [4]. WOM is an informal way of person-to-person communication regarding a brand, a product, service, or their providers [5]. WOM has significant influence on a consumer's purchase decision [6,7] and is a powerful information resource that helps shape consumers' attitude toward a product or service (Katz & Paul, 1996).

Looking for negativity! How review sentiment and review subjectivity form review helpfulness across cultures

“…The literature also suggests that consumers tend to find concrete information more useful as it promotes customer satisfaction (Packard & Berger, 2017, 2020; Thomas, 2020) in that less concrete language leads to greater skepticism (Backof et al, 2016; Nolder & Kadous, 2018; Rasso, 2015). Importantly, Wang et al (2015) showed that consumers found negative information more concrete and helpful. Building on this body of research, we argue that since consumers use reviews to reduce their uncertainty about a product, more factual (objective/concrete) review content would be considered useful as it would inform the purchase decision more so than nonfactual (subjective/abstract) information.…”

Selectively Emotional: How Smartphone Use Changes User-Generated Content

“…Prior work on online WOM has shown that its impact or persuasiveness depends on factors such as the characteristics of the reviewer (e.g., Godes and Mayzlin 2009) and the characteristics of the review itself, such as its linguistic characteristics (e.g., Schellekens, Verlegh, and Smidts 2010). While some of these findings would imply that smartphonegenerated WOM might be less impactful or persuasive than PC-generated content (e.g., Banerjee and Chua 2014;Wang et al 2015), other findings suggest that smartphonegenerated content would actually be more impactful. For example, Ludwig et al (2013) find that increasing the proportion of positive emotional language in Amazon reviews led to higher customer conversion rates.…”