Social Comparison Theory and Deception in the Interpersonal Exchange of Consumption Information

Abstract

Four experiments demonstrate that self-threatening social comparison information motivates consumers to lie. Factors related to self-threat, including relevance of the social comparison target (i.e., the importance of the comparison person), comparison discrepancy (i.e., the magnitude of the performance difference), comparison direction (i.e., whether one performs better or worse), nature of the information (i.e., whether the comparison is social or objective), and perceived attainability (i.e., the possibility of achieving the compared performance), influenced consumers' willingness to engage in deception. Results extend social comparison theory by demonstrating that comparisons that threaten public and private selves have implications for lying behaviors. (c) 2006 by JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH, Inc..

A comparison of online and offline gender and goal directed shopping online

“…Gender behaviour will differ because of the environment in which the consumer shops, that is, whether online or offline (Brown et al 2007;Noble et al 2006). This proposition is supported by Sengupta et al (2002) and Argo et al (2006) and, who found empirical evidence that a consumer's gender related behaviour will vary because of the effect of symbolic consumption and social comparison. Offline a male engages in what society perceives to be typical male behaviors.…”

Cognitive Dissonance, Social Comparison, and Disseminating Untruthful or Negative Truthful Ewom Messages

“…To further elucidate the findings of untruthful WOM messages (for the purpose of releasing conflicting pressure), Argo et al (2006) argued that when individuals perceive social-comparison information as threatening, they are more likely to provide deceptive or untruthful information, because they are striving to protect themselves or relieve stress. Thus, we infer that after making upward comparisons on the Internet, individuals with high dissonance perceive themselves to be in a more threatening situation compared to the situation in which low-cognitive-dissonance individuals perceive themselves to be.…”

“…Previous research (e.g., Argo and Shiv, 2012) demonstrated that social comparisons occur frequently in online communities and can influence consumers' buying decisions. When people face upward comparisons, it is likely that they are more conservative about the eWOM messages behaviour (Argo et al, 2006). Sengupta et al (1999) explain that people tend to protect their public-self when comparing themselves to those who perform better.…”

“…After making upward comparisons on the Internet, individuals with high cognitive dissonance are more likely to make untruthful eWOM statements compared to individuals with low cognitive dissonance. The possible explanation is that these high cognitive dissonance consumers may perceive social-comparison information as threatening (Argo et al, 2006), and tend to increase their belief about the product itself positively for comforting their unbalanced feelings. In contrast to this, individuals who have a high cognitive dissonance level are more willing to provide negative WOM messages than those who experience lower cognitive dissonance when face downward comparisons.…”

“…The Internet is one of the most convenient and effective channels by which people can quickly share their thoughts. Depending on the degree of cognitive dissonance, or as a result of self-persuasion, the consumer in the above situation might provide negative information about the product (e.g., Hennig-Thurau et al, 2004) or provide positive or negative information that is actually untruthful (Argo et al, 2006). In addition, when cognitively dissonant consumers who are experiencing conflicting TRUTHFUL NEGATIVE UNTRUTHFUL WOM MESSAGES emotions and engaging in self-persuasion read and compare their experiences with those of others (which may be more positive or negative than the consumer's personal experiences), their feelings and cognition might change; they might then accordingly change their word-ofmouth (WOM) messages about the product (Smith, 2000).…”