Research On The Influence Of Other People’s Evaluation On Consumers’ Product Attitude Under Different Social Distance

With the wide application of social media such as microblog and blog,online shopping scenes are more and more abundant.Some foreign shopping platforms such as revoo have shown online commentators such as demographic data and interests.Yelp even forces elite commentators to disclose their relevant information,and the more specific,the better.Many online companies in China have also begun to encourage commentators to provide real identities,and spend money to build various identity information platforms.This study is based on this reality demand-whether it is necessary to encourage commentators to open their information.Some scholars have shown that consumers respond differently to other people’s evaluation under different social distances: the persuasiveness of similar information sources is greater than that of different information sources.However,none of the above-mentioned studies has explained the internal mechanism of consumers’ different responses to other people’s evaluations at different social distances(i.e.why the information persuasiveness of similar information sources is greater than that of different information sources),which makes the relationship between other people’s evaluations at different social distances and consumers’ product attitudes a "black box".This paper will focus on the evaluation of consumers’ products at different social distances The influence of product attitude is studied.This study uses the experimental method to study the mediating effect of interpersonal attraction between different social distance evaluation and consumer product attitude,as well as the moderating effect of product type on interpersonal attraction and consumer product attitude.Based on the literature review of social distance,interpersonal attraction,product type(function vs pleasure),consumer product attitude,social cognitive dissonance theory and social comparison theory,this paperputs forward relevant hypotheses,builds theoretical model,designs and implements pre experiment(to determine the control test of product and social distance)and formal experiment(Society)Distance(near vs far)× product type(hedonic vs functional)two factor mixed experiment)to verify that the influence of other people’s evaluation on consumer’s product attitude under different social distances,the influence mechanism(intermediary role of interpersonal attraction)and the influence of interpersonal attraction on consumer’s product attitude are regulated by product type(hedonic vs functional).The results show that consumers are more willing to accept the evaluation of close social distance than the evaluation of distant social distance,and the evaluation of close social distance is more likely to affect consumers’ product attitude.Interpersonal attraction plays an intermediary role between the social distance between product reviewers and consumers and their product attitudes.Among them,compared with the far social distance evaluation,the near social distance evaluation is more likely to produce interpersonal attraction to consumers.Interpersonal attraction has a positive effect on consumers’ product attitude.In addition,the results also found that the positive effect of interpersonal attraction on consumer’s product attitude was regulated by product type(function vs hedonic),that is,the positive effect of interpersonal attraction on hedonic product attitude was greater than that of functional product.The above research enriches the related research of social distance and interpersonal attraction theory.