Influence Of Awe On Sharing Intention

Environmental degradation and global warming have caused adverse health,economic,environmental,and social impacts at national level as well as at a global scale.It has been shown that these consequences are partly due to people’s consumption behaviors.To address the negative impacts of environmental degradation,government policymakers as well as opinion leaders from various fields actively advocate the concept of supporting sustainable development and consumption patterns,such as idle resource sharing.At the same time,a lot of research has been done from diverse perspectives in the field of sustainability,all pointing to the importance of idle resource sharing.From the social level,sharing economy can integrate idle resources and improve the utilization efficiency of idle resources.From the environmental perspective,the sharing economy is conducive to low-carbon emission reduction,reduction of resource waste,green and sustainable development and environmental protection.From the personal level,the sharing economy can meet the demand to consume the right of use,and provide opportunities for flexible employment and the realization of social value.However,sharing economy is characterized by the short-term use of shared resources by strangers.On the one hand,the use of strangers may make the shared items face the risk of being damaged or discarded.On the other hand,the in-depth understanding of the private field by strangers improves the possibility of privacy invasion,which leads to the low willingness of many individuals with idle resources to share.How to improve the willingness of individuals to share underutilized resources with others is becoming an urgent problem for enterprises and academia.To improve the willingness of individuals to share idle resources to others and further gain and maintain market competitive advantage,sharing economy enterprises usually adopt economic incentives and other ways to attract more individuals with idle resources to participate.Simultaneously,researchers have explored the factors that drive individuals to share idle resources from different perspectives such as environment,society and self-assessment.Despite these research efforts,outcomes are less than ideal.One key reason is that most sharing economy research has been conducted from a constraint perspective based on the cognitive view,ignoring the risks individuals face when sharing idle resources with others.In reality,a small amount of benefits or rewards does not provide a basis for choosing to implement sufficient changes that favor sharing economy,which means high risk to them and is based on altruistic motives for others’ and nature’s sake.In addition to economic incentives,social and environmental pressures,individuals will also be affected by emotions of self-transcendence in relation to sharing and promoting sustainable lifestyles.Thus,the change reducing the self-importance and increasing the attention to others and society is of vital importance for facilitating idle resources sharing.In this research,we propose that a novel way of achieving such change: feelings of awe.Awe arises when people encounter something vast that is beyond their current knowledge and existing mental structures,provoking a need to update their mental schemas.Awe is a self-transcendent emotion that enables individuals to be less concerned about immediate benefits and costs,and to pay greater attention to the welfare of others and environment.In addition,awe can also accumulate positive psychological resources to play a role in times of crisis.Awe has attracted considerable attention from researchers in the fields of theology,philosophy,sociology,and psychology,while the attention is limited and insufficient in marketing.Research on the role of awe in marketing is still in the primary stage,with only a few recent studies examining the ideas that awe promotes experience innovation and green consumption,decreases the preference for conspicuous consumption.However,there is no research to prove the buffer effect of awe on the negative experience associated with idle resource sharing.Accordingly,in order to extend research on this topic,this paper examines awe in the context of sharing economy and attempts to answer the following questions:Q1: How does awe affect sharing intention?Q2: What is the psychological mechanism by which awe affects sharing intention?Q3: We also attempt to identify a condition under which the facilitative effect of awe on sharing intention turns off.To solve the above problems,we propose that awe is an important driver for individuals to share idle resources via weakening the territoriality.In addition,the existence of these effects may be moderated by regulatory focus,perceived similarity and involvement.Through a survey of 1239 respondents and six experiments,and online second-hand data,this paper conducted an empirical test on the effect,mechanism and boundary of awe.In experiment 1,a preliminary experiment was conducted before the formal experiment.Pre-experiment 1 and pre-experiment 2mainly used in-depth interviews to understand the general public’s understanding of the concepts of awe and sharing economy.It was found that most of the subjects could briefly describe the concepts and characteristics of awe and sharing economy.Pre-experiment 3 mainly used secondary data to preliminarily explore which emotional experiences make individuals more likely to share.It was found that compared with other emotions,individuals were more willing to share after experiencing awe.The formal experiment is mainly used to test the main effect of this paper,namely the causal relationship between awe and sharing intention,while excluding the influence of other emotions other than awe.Experiment 2 mainly tested the mediating effect of territoriality and excluded the alternative explanation mechanism of time perception.Experiment 3 is mainly used to test other scenes that can induce awe except for the natural scenes.The results show that in addition to the spectacular natural scenes,social scenes and negative natural scenes can also induce awe and they have the same effect.Both of them can enhance the willingness to share by weakening territoriality.Experiment 4,experiment 5 and experiment 6 were used to verify the moderating effect of regulatory focus,perceived similarity and involvement,respectively.In the end,all the assumptions in this article have been tested.This paper contributes to the literature in the following ways.First,while most studies on sharing economy have been conducted using a constraint perspective,this study takes the perspective of a positive emotion,awe.Idle resource sharing positively responds to the concept of Shared development,accelerates the flow of overall resources in the society,improves the sustainable development of the environment,and promotes the collaboration and cooperation between individuals and other social units.Although the positive effects of sharing economy have been confirmed and verified,the pressure from external constraints and various risks associated with sharing idle resources lead to the low willingness of individuals to participate in sharing economy activities.In the present study,we construct a green consumption model using awe as the independent variable with the aim of improving the willingness to actively share by activating the autonomic nervous systemSecond,through the introduction of territoriality,this study explores the psychological mechanism of the formation of individual sharing intention.Edney(1974),Brown et al.(2005)and Malmberg(2019)found that protecting the integrity of property and self is an instinctive response rooted in the level of consciousness.At present,researches on idle resource individuals mainly focus on the objective antecedents of the formation of sharing intention,ignoring the role of psychological mechanism at the micro level.In order to fill in the existing theoretical gaps,this paper considers territoriality as a mediator to explore and study the effect of awe.Third,this paper also further indicates the extent of the explanatory effect of territoriality on awe and sharing intention.Territoriality is not a fixed ideology,and its strength is also influenced by other factors,such as the tendency of individuals to regulatory focus,the degree of perceived similarity with others or the level of involvement in the Shared items.In order to test the conditions for the existence of these effects,this paper conducts an integrated discussion from three dimensions of individuals,environment and resources.