Construal of Social Relationships in Online Consumer Reviews

ABSTRACT

Online consumer reviews are known for influencing consumers toward a purchase decision. Reviews contain a variety of features (e.g., star ratings) that have motivated researchers to investigate features of a review leading consumers to accept and act upon the shared information. What is lacking in research are the social components between a consumer and reviewer that may spark a consumer to perceive a social closeness to a reviewer. The perceived social relationship between the consumer and the reviewer, we believe, influences the acceptance of information in a review. Using Construal Level Theory as a lens to examine the social psychological distance between consumers and reviewers, this study investigates this social relationship to determine how people process information in a review, thus impacting their acceptance of the information to form a purchase decision. Our findings suggest there is a significant role in this social relationship and the acceptance of information.

KEYWORDS:

• construal level theory
• online consumer reviews
• social psychological distance
• search goods
• e-commerce

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ A balance of negative (1-star rated) and positive (5-star rated) reviews were constructed and used for the experiment to remove variance that may be caused due to a review’s criticality.

² The Linguistic style and argument quality conditions were prepared by using LIWC (Language Inquiry Word Count)³² as an assessment of the treatment stimuli. Reviews of ‘high’ linguistic style had used more emotional based words whereas reviews of ‘low’ linguistic style used little to no emotionally based words. Using LIWC, the affective measures for each condition (High vs. Low) were measured and found to be statistically different. Reviews with ‘high’ argument quality contained more overall words whereas reviews with ‘low’ argument quality had less words and were simple in nature. The differences between high and low word counts were significantly different between each condition. Both linguistic style and argument quality used in the final analysis were psychometric measures of participant perceptions based on the treatments received.