The Power of Sharing Negative Information in a Dyadic Context

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate a theoretical explanation of the mechanism of sharing negative attitudes and how it can have an impact on forming attitudes toward the targets and impressions about partners who engage in sharing attitudes. One hundred and fourteen university students were assigned to dyadic interactions with strangers and were asked to share positive, negative, or equally valenced aspects of a target topic. Findings indicated that sharing a negative attitude had significantly more capacity to change attitudes about a target in a negative direction than did sharing a mixed or a positive attitude. Sharing a negative attitude did not increase liking of one's partner. The practical implications and future directions of studying the Negativity Effect and interpersonal behavior are discussed.Among communicative behaviors such as complaining and gossiping, a common act of sharing a negative attitude can be found. In everyday interpersonal communication, sharing negative attitudes is a prevalent and prevailing phenomenon (Kowalski, 1996;Turner, Mazur, Wendel, & Winslow, 2003). Although complaining and gossiping have many implications associated with interpersonal communication, not many interpersonal communication scholars have devoted research to these behaviors. This study provides a theoretical explanation of the mechanism of sharing a negative attitude and its impact on forming (a) attitudes toward the targets and (b) impressions about partners who engage in negative attitude sharing interaction.Complaining usually accompanies acts of expressing dissatisfaction or an unfavorable attitude toward an object, person, or situation (Kowalski, 1996) as a means of Correspondence to:

How brand self‐disclosure helps brands create intimacy with customers: The role of information valence and anthropomorphism

“…Therefore, one may wonder if-beyond the mere act of disclosing information-the type of information may be of importance for consumers' reactions. Further, the literature on self-disclosure indicates that, although selfdisclosure is an important means for developing intimate relationships (Waring & Chelune, 1983), sharing negative information changes attitudes about the provider of the information in a more negative direction than does sharing a mixed or a positive information (Yoo, 2009). Therefore, reasons exist to believe that brand selfdisclosure may reveal more positive for intimacy when the disclosed information is seen positively (vs. negatively) by consumers.…”

“…When feeling a lack of intimate relationships with close others, consumers use brands to cope with the emotional loneliness (Loh et al, 2021), and our research thus indicates that by disclosing positive information, brands may contribute to strengthening their relationships with such consumers because of the intimacy that is created from such brand self-disclosure. showing that all brand self-disclosures are not equal (Taylor et al, 2010;Yoo, 2009), with those that are positive being more likely to help brands develop relationships with their customers.…”

Opening the Door of Self-Disclosure

“…The discloser must also consider whether to disclose negative information, as this may result in a negative evaluation of the discloser, and therefore testing the possible response of the partner prior to disclosure is recommended (Hargie, 2017; Yoo, 2009).…”

Activity in the brain’s valuation and mentalizing networks is associated with propagation of online recommendations

“…Our research also examines an open question in the literature about whether brain activity tracking social influence is sensitive to the valence of recommendations. Mentalizing may broadly aid in understanding others' viewpoints, and the value system might broadly assess the value of peer recommendations, tracking with opinion change in response to both positive and negative recommendations; alternatively, these systems may respond more strongly in situations where people are most likely to assess social consequences of their actions, such as in response to negative social evaluation [23][24][25][26] . Behavioral evidence suggests that negative (versus positive) peer recommendations may lead to greater conformity 2,10 .…”