Shih-Chieh Chuang

Effect of Perceived Benefits on Reluctance to Trade

People often tend to be reluctant to trade an owned object for an alternative object. This concept of reluctance to trade is generally called “endowment effect”. Loss aversion, which denotes that losses are weighted more heavily than gains, has been applied to interpret the endowment effect. Specifically, no “reluctance to trade” will occur when no loss is involved. In this research, 172 (90 women, 82 men; M age = 21 yr., SD =1.2) and 152 (82 women, 70 men; M age = 21 yr., SD =1.8) undergraduates voluntarily participated in two experiments, respectively. Results of both experiments indicated that participants were willing to trade an owned object for an alternative object when both objects were of the same benefit type and were reluctant to trade when objects were different. Clearly, an exchange was perceived as lower loss when the owned object and the alternative object were of the same benefit type, leading to no reluctance to trade.

Message Framing in Social Networking Sites

Online social networking sites represent significant new opportunities for Internet advertisers. However, results based on the real world cannot be generalized to all virtual worlds. In this research, the moderating effects of need for cognition (NFC) and knowledge were applied to examine the impact of message framing on attitudes toward social networking sites. A total of 216 undergraduates participated in the study. Results reveal that for social networking sites, while high-NFC individuals form more favorable attitudes toward negatively framed messages than positively framed messages, low-NFC individuals form more favorable attitudes toward positively framed messages than negatively framed messages. In addition, low-knowledge individuals demonstrate more favorable attitudes toward negatively framed messages than positively framed messages; however, the framing effect does not differentially affect the attitudes of high-knowledge individuals. Furthermore, the framing effect does not differentially affect the attitudes of high-NFC individuals with high knowledge. In contrast, low-NFC individuals with low knowledge hold more favorable attitudes toward positively framed messages than negatively framed messages.

The Effect of Regulatory Focus on Conformity Behavior

This article examines the influence of regulatory focus on conformity. Three experimental situations are developed to examine the effect. Experiment 1 reveals that regulatory focus influences conformity, with the effect being more obvious under a prevention-focused condition, in which people conform more strongly with others, than under a promotion-focused condition. In Experiment 2, the effect of regulatory focus on conformity is mediated by informational influences and normative influences. The results of Experiment 3 show that under a high cognitive load, the effect of regulatory focus on conformity disappears.