IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/joinma/v27y2013i1p14-27.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

A Walk in Customers' Shoes: How Attentional Bias Modification Affects Ownership of Integrity-violating Social Media Posts

Author

Listed:
  • van Laer, Tom
  • de Ruyter, Ko
  • Cox, David

Abstract

The number of social media posts that expose company integrity violations has increased dramatically. In response, some companies empower employees to respond to customer blogs, which requires employees to recognize the customer's perspective. We show that attentional bias modification can be used to prime employees of two global Fortune 100 companies with a self-sufficiency or empathy bias. The results indicate that narrative transportation, or the extent to which employees mentally enter the world evoked by a customer's story, mediates the effect of attentional bias on two relevant psychological ownership dimensions: acknowledgment of responsibility and willingness to respond. Participants with a self-sufficiency bias neither acknowledge responsibility nor want to respond. However, participants primed with an empathy bias take responsibility for the customer's case and respond to the integrity violation. We find evidence for two boundary conditions of this effect: (1) it strengthens when the employee perceives the customer's financial vulnerability as high and (2) it weakens when the customer is impolite in the blog post.

Suggested Citation

  • van Laer, Tom & de Ruyter, Ko & Cox, David, 2013. "A Walk in Customers' Shoes: How Attentional Bias Modification Affects Ownership of Integrity-violating Social Media Posts," Journal of Interactive Marketing, Elsevier, vol. 27(1), pages 14-27.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:joinma:v:27:y:2013:i:1:p:14-27
    DOI: 10.1016/j.intmar.2012.09.002
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1094996812000515
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.intmar.2012.09.002?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Berry, Leonard L. & Seiders, Kathleen, 2008. "Serving unfair customers," Business Horizons, Elsevier, vol. 51(1), pages 29-37.
    2. Deighton, John & Kornfeld, Leora, 2009. "Interactivity's Unanticipated Consequences for Marketers and Marketing," Journal of Interactive Marketing, Elsevier, vol. 23(1), pages 4-10.
    3. Jennifer Edson Escalas, 2007. "Self-Referencing and Persuasion: Narrative Transportation versus Analytical Elaboration," Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Consumer Research Inc., vol. 33(4), pages 421-429, December.
    4. Joseph Farrell & Matthew Rabin, 1996. "Cheap Talk," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 10(3), pages 103-118, Summer.
    5. van Laer, Tom & de Ruyter, Ko, 2010. "In stories we trust: How narrative apologies provide cover for competitive vulnerability after integrity-violating blog posts," International Journal of Research in Marketing, Elsevier, vol. 27(2), pages 164-174.
    6. Small, Deborah A. & Loewenstein, George & Slovic, Paul, 2007. "Sympathy and callousness: The impact of deliberative thought on donations to identifiable and statistical victims," Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Elsevier, vol. 102(2), pages 143-153, March.
    7. Escalas, Jennifer Edson & Stern, Barbara B, 2003. "Sympathy and Empathy: Emotional Responses to Advertising Dramas," Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Consumer Research Inc., vol. 29(4), pages 566-578, March.
    8. Thomas Tang & Toto Sutarso & Grace Davis & Dariusz Dolinski & Abdul Ibrahim & Sharon Wagner, 2008. "To Help or Not to Help? The Good Samaritan Effect and the Love of Money on Helping Behavior," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 82(4), pages 865-887, November.
    9. Kopelman, Shirli & Rosette, Ashleigh Shelby & Thompson, Leigh, 2006. "The three faces of Eve: Strategic displays of positive, negative, and neutral emotions in negotiations," Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Elsevier, vol. 99(1), pages 81-101, January.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Potdar, Balkrushna & Guthrie, John & Gnoth, Juergen & Garry, Tony, 2018. "The role of psychological ownership in shoplifting prevention: An exploratory study," Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, Elsevier, vol. 44(C), pages 253-265.
    2. Hollebeek, Linda D. & Glynn, Mark S. & Brodie, Roderick J., 2014. "Consumer Brand Engagement in Social Media: Conceptualization, Scale Development and Validation," Journal of Interactive Marketing, Elsevier, vol. 28(2), pages 149-165.
    3. Aleti, Torgeir & Pallant, Jason I. & Tuan, Annamaria & van Laer, Tom, 2019. "Tweeting with the Stars: Automated Text Analysis of the Effect of Celebrity Social Media Communications on Consumer Word of Mouth," Journal of Interactive Marketing, Elsevier, vol. 48(C), pages 17-32.
    4. Tom Laer, 2014. "The Means to Justify the End: Combating Cyber Harassment in Social Media," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 123(1), pages 85-98, August.
    5. Grigsby, Jamie L. & Mellema, Hillary N., 2020. "Negative Consequences of Storytelling in Native Advertising," Journal of Interactive Marketing, Elsevier, vol. 52(C), pages 61-78.
    6. Simona VINEREAN & Alin OPREANA, 2015. "Consumer Engagement in Online Settings: Conceptualization and Validation of Measurement Scales," Expert Journal of Marketing, Sprint Investify, vol. 3(2), pages 35-50.
    7. Seher Uçkun & Aykut Arslan & Serdar Yener, 2020. "Could CSR Practices Increase Employee Affective Commitment via Moral Attentiveness?," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 12(19), pages 1-17, October.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. van Laer, Tom & de Ruyter, Ko, 2010. "In stories we trust: How narrative apologies provide cover for competitive vulnerability after integrity-violating blog posts," International Journal of Research in Marketing, Elsevier, vol. 27(2), pages 164-174.
    2. Dessart, Laurence & Pitardi, Valentina, 2019. "How stories generate consumer engagement: An exploratory study," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 104(C), pages 183-195.
    3. Aleti, Torgeir & Pallant, Jason I. & Tuan, Annamaria & van Laer, Tom, 2019. "Tweeting with the Stars: Automated Text Analysis of the Effect of Celebrity Social Media Communications on Consumer Word of Mouth," Journal of Interactive Marketing, Elsevier, vol. 48(C), pages 17-32.
    4. van Laer, Tom & Feiereisen, Stephanie & Visconti, Luca M., 2019. "Storytelling in the digital era: A meta-analysis of relevant moderators of the narrative transportation effect," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 96(C), pages 135-146.
    5. Yossi Maaravi & Orly Idan & Guy Hochman, 2019. "And sympathy is what we need my friend—Polite requests improve negotiation results," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 14(3), pages 1-22, March.
    6. Gilliam, David A. & Zablah, Alex R., 2013. "Storytelling during retail sales encounters," Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, Elsevier, vol. 20(5), pages 488-494.
    7. van Noort, Guda & Willemsen, Lotte M., 2012. "Online Damage Control: The Effects of Proactive Versus Reactive Webcare Interventions in Consumer-generated and Brand-generated Platforms," Journal of Interactive Marketing, Elsevier, vol. 26(3), pages 131-140.
    8. Kick, Markus, 2015. "Social Media Research: A Narrative Review," EconStor Preprints 182506, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics.
    9. Yang, Zhihao & Wang, Desheng & Li, Tingting & Han, Jie, 2023. "Customizing a consumers’ story for you: The impact of protagonist geographical distance on willingness to share," Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, Elsevier, vol. 74(C).
    10. Tom Laer, 2014. "The Means to Justify the End: Combating Cyber Harassment in Social Media," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 123(1), pages 85-98, August.
    11. Farivar, Samira & Wang, Fang, 2022. "Effective influencer marketing: A social identity perspective," Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, Elsevier, vol. 67(C).
    12. Martha Jeong & Julia Minson & Michael Yeomans & Francesca Gino, 2019. "Communicating with Warmth in Distributive Negotiations Is Surprisingly Counterproductive," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 65(12), pages 5813-5837, December.
    13. Dharun Kasilingam & Soundararaj Ajitha, 2022. "Storytelling in advertisements: understanding the effect of humor and drama on the attitude toward brands," Journal of Brand Management, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 29(4), pages 341-362, July.
    14. Schamari, Julia & Schaefers, Tobias, 2015. "Leaving the Home Turf: How Brands Can Use Webcare on Consumer-generated Platforms to Increase Positive Consumer Engagement," Journal of Interactive Marketing, Elsevier, vol. 30(C), pages 20-33.
    15. Claudia M. Landeo & Kathryn E. Spier, 2016. "Stipulated Damages as a Rent-Extraction Mechanism: Experimental Evidence," Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics (JITE), Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen, vol. 172(2), pages 235-273, June.
    16. Winkler, Bernhard, 2000. "Which kind of transparency? On the need for clarity in monetary policy-making," Working Paper Series 0026, European Central Bank.
    17. Radu Vranceanu & Damien Besancenot & Delphine Dubart, 2014. "Can Rumors and Other Uninformative Messages Cause Illiquidity ?," CEPN Working Papers hal-00841167, HAL.
    18. Lucius Caviola & Nadira Faulmüller & Jim. A. C. Everett & Julian Savulescu & Guy Kahane, 2014. "The evaluability bias in charitable giving: Saving administration costs or saving lives?," Judgment and Decision Making, Society for Judgment and Decision Making, vol. 9(4), pages 303-315, July.
    19. Sylvie Thoron, 2016. "Morality Beyond Social Preferences: Smithian Sympathy, Social Neuroscience and the Nature of Social Consciousness [La moralité au delà des préférences sociales. La sympathie Smithienne, les neurosc," Post-Print hal-01645043, HAL.
    20. Smith, Andrew N. & Fischer, Eileen & Yongjian, Chen, 2012. "How Does Brand-related User-generated Content Differ across YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter?," Journal of Interactive Marketing, Elsevier, vol. 26(2), pages 102-113.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:joinma:v:27:y:2013:i:1:p:14-27. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.journals.elsevier.com/journal-of-interactive-marketing/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.