“Don’t buy” or “do not buy”? How negation style in online reviews influences consumer product evaluations

ABSTRACT

We investigate how different negation styles – that is, contracted (e.g., “isn’t”) versus full negations (e.g., “is not”) – in electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) influence consumers’ evaluations of and willingness to pay for target products. We find that consumers evaluate products more positively when reviews contain contracted negations, as compared to full negations. This occurs because consumers perceive a reviewer who uses contracted negations as warmer and thus more competent than one who uses full negations; these positive perceptions increase consumers’ product evaluations. This research identifies a novel social pathway underlying consumers’ information processing in reviews and highlights the social aspects of eWOM.

Notes

¹ In addition to this subjective measure of the typicality of using contracted negations, we also tested the prevalence of contracted negations differently, using an existing corpus of Amazon book reviews (N = 200; Moore, 2015); this can serve as an objective measure of how typically contracted negations are used in reviews. The total number of negations was counted and coded as either contracted or full negations. Contracted negations comprised 77.5% of the negations, confirming that they are more prevalent and common than full negations.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the University of Alberta School of Business Winspear Faculty Fellowship; University of Alberta School of Business Southam/Edmonton Journal Faculty Fellowship; Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Insight Grant #435-2015-0100.