The Reflex Of Evaluative Conditioning On The College Student's Compensatory Consumption

The self-threat of comparison believed that the threat was produced by the accessible of knowledge, and the knowledge was depended on the activation of previous knowledge or material. Without specific target of social comparison, people prefer to choose and compare with an existing compare target or build an implicit target. Evaluative conditioning theory believes that by establish a connection over and over again, people may change their former attitude, and this change will last. So we can use the EC to change our participant's attitude and make the knowledge more accessible, then induce the threat of comparison. When faced with threat people like to use some ways to relax our threat, compensatory consumption can be the way to moderate our threat.Our experiment was taken in the group of university students. The present study explores the relationship of evaluative conditioning and compensatory consumption through 2 experiments. In experiment 1, we use 2(gender: male vs. female) x 2(group: one vs. two) design, participants were required to take part in an experimental process and then fill in the questionnaire, we tested the evaluative condition whether influence the following virtual compensatory consumption or not. In experiment 2, we use 2(self-affirmation: yes vs. no) x 2(group: one vs. two) between-subjects design to confirm the effect of self-affirmation. Results showed that: 1) Gender difference exist in the compensation consumption interaction, female college students will increase the appearance of their consumption related compensation after establish an evaluative conditioning that star-positive and normal-negative, while male college students are opposite. 2) Social comparative effect exist in college students' group, the self-affirmation can mitigate the threat. Self-affirmation in appearance has significant main effect on consumption. 3) Participants have different response time in different evaluative conditional. 4) This study find that subjects have self-affirmation to cope with threats, and the strategy will affect follow-up consumer behavior, self-affirmation can let the participants more rational in consumption and less affected by the former evaluative conditioning.