690
Journal of Marketing Research
Vol. XLV (December 2008), 690–701
© 2008, American Marketing Association
ISSN: 0022-2437 (print), 1547-7193 (electronic)
*Jennifer J. Argo is Roger S. Smith Associate Professor of Marketing,
School of Business, University of Alberta (e-mail: jennifer.argo@
ualberta.ca). Darren W. Dahl is Fred H. Siller Professor of Marketing,
Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia (e-mail:
darren.dahl@sauder.ubc.ca). Andrea C. Morales is Assistant Professor of
Marketing, W.P. Carey School of Business, Arizona State University
(e-mail: acmorales@asu.edu). Each author contributed equally to this
research, and the order of authorship is alphabetical. The authors thank
Peter Dacin, Allison Johnson, and Morgan Ward for their helpful com-
ments. The financial support from the University of Alberta and the Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada is gratefully
acknowledged. The authors also extend thanks to the University of
Alberta’s bookstore for its assistance in conducting the experiments. Dilip
Soman served as associate editor for this article.
JENNIFER J. ARGO, DARREN W. DAHL, and ANDREA C. MORALES*
This research examines the impact of attractiveness on consumers
during a consumption experience. Specifically, it examines the effects of
an attractive social influence in the context of touching and contamination
of store products by investigating how consumers respond when they
see attractive others touching the same products they want to purchase.
In doing so, it provides the first experimental evidence of a positive
contagion effect in either the marketing or the psychology literature.
Across three field experiments using an actual retail shopping
environment, the authors find that product evaluations are higher when
consumers perceive a product as having been physically touched by a
highly attractive other. Moreover, they identify sex as a critical moderating
variable in the realization of this positive contagion effect; the contact
source and observing consumer must be of the opposite sex for positive
contagion to occur. Finally, in contrast to previous work, the authors
demonstrate that these effects are driven by a physical model of
contagion.
Keywords: contamination, contagion, attractiveness, social influence,
retail
Positive Consumer Contagion: Responses to
Attractive Others in a Retail Context
When it comes to physical touch in retail settings, con-
sumers are faced with a paradox. On the one hand, they
want to touch products before buying because it helps them
gather information and make better purchase decisions
(Mooy and Robben 2002; Peck and Childers 2003). On the
other hand, they feel disgusted when other people touch the
products they want to buy and view touched products as
having been negatively contaminated (Argo, Dahl, and
Morales 2006). Thus, it appears that consumers want to
touch products while shopping but do not want others to do
the same. Is this always the case? Are there situations in the
retail context in which products touched by other people
result in positive reactions from a consumer? The central
focus of this research is to determine when physical contact
between a product and another person creates positive out-
comes for the consumer.
Prior research in persuasion and advertising, along with
current business practices, has indicated that the beauty and
attractiveness of other consumers may play an influential
role in addressing our research question. Research involv-
ing ad appeals that use themes of beauty and attraction
(e.g., Belch, Belch, and Villarreal 1987; Percy and Rossiter
1992) as a source effect (Petty, Cacioppo, and Schumann
1983) to influence brand attitudes and purchase intentions
hint at an important role for beauty and attractiveness in the
retail context. Indeed, retail managers seem to believe
strongly that beauty can be an extremely powerful persua-
sion tool. For example, Abercrombie & Fitch has been in
the headlines for specifically trying to hire “young, attrac-
tive, mainstream athletic types, and the cheerleaders who
might be their girlfriends” to work in their stores (Edwards
2003a, p. 16; see also Bryant 1999; Edwards 2003b; Kang
2005; Nudd 2002; Parekh 2004; Perman 2002). Indeed, the
company believes so strongly that the attractiveness of
employees matters that it requires store managers to get
approval for new employees by sending their photos to
company headquarters (Edwards 2003a).

Positive Consumer Contagion 691
However, despite the prominence and practice of the
belief that beauty and attractiveness are important in the
retail atmosphere, surprisingly little research has actually
examined the impact of people who are high in attrac-
tiveness (versus average in attractiveness) on consumers
during an actual shopping experience. To date, most
research has focused on the use of attractive models or
endorsers in advertising and persuasion (Henderson-King
and Henderson-King 1997; Martin and Gentry 1997;
Richins 1991; Smeesters and Mandel 2006) but has not
focused on the role of attractiveness in the retail consump-
tion experience itself. Thus, this research provides insight
into the effects of an attractive social influence in the con-
text of consumer touching and contamination of store prod-
ucts. Specifically, we investigate how consumers respond
when they see other people of varying levels of attractive-
ness touching the same products they want to purchase.
This research makes several unique and important contri-
butions. First, our findings represent the first experimental
evidence of a positive contagion effect in either the market-
ing or the psychology literature. Using an actual retail
shopping environment in which a product is perceived as
having been physically touched by a highly attractive other,
we find that positive consumer contagion serves to raise
product evaluations. Second, we identify a person’s sex as a
critical moderating variable in the realization of this posi-
tive contagion. A highly attractive contact source and the
recipient consumer must be of the opposite sex for positive
contagion to occur. Third, to obtain a better understanding
of this effect, we test and show that a physical model of
contagion (Nemeroff and Rozin 1994), resulting from the
actual physical transfer of essence, underlies our findings.
Finally, our research rules out competing explanations for
the identified effects, thus providing a robust identification
of how positive contagion occurs and what outcomes it
provides.
CONCEPTUAL BACKGROUND
Contagion in a Retail Context
In the late 1800s and early 1900s, anthropologists devel-
oped the laws of sympathetic magic (Frazer [1890] 1959;
Mauss [1902] 1972; Tylor [1871] 1974). These laws pro-
vide a broad theory about how the world works and influ-
ences how people think and interpret information. A central
law of sympathetic magic is the law of contagion. Accord-
ing to this law, a source (person/object) can influence a
recipient (another person/object) simply by touching it
either directly or indirectly (Rozin and Nemeroff 1990). On
contact, the source passes some or even all of its properties
to the recipient through a contagious entity or “essence,”
which then remains part of the recipient even after they are
no longer touching.
Although anthropologists originally used the law of con-
tagion to interpret customs and rituals in primitive cultures
(Meigs 1984), it has also been shown to influence behavior
in Western culture. For example, correlational research has
found that, in general, contact with a disgusting source (i.e.,
an undesirable person or object) results in lower evaluations
of the recipient object (Nemeroff 1995; Rozin, Markwith,
and McCauley 1994; Rozin, Millman, and Nemeroff 1986;
Rozin et al. 1989), whereas contact with a desirable source
can raise evaluations (Rozin, Markwith, and McCauley
1994; Rozin, Millman, and Nemeroff 1986). However,
these findings are not limited to one domain; rather, they
are far-reaching and have been found to hold true for every-
thing from a glass of juice being touched by a cockroach to
a sweater having been worn by Adolf Hitler or a lover.
More recently, we have begun investigating how the law
of contagion operates in a retail setting. Specifically, we
found that consumers react negatively to products they
believe have been in contact with other consumers (Argo,
Dahl, and Morales 2006). We refer to this process as con-
sumer contamination and find that when consumers receive
contamination cues (i.e., signals: proximity to contact,
recency since contact, and the number of contact sources)
that contact has occurred, they lower their evaluations of,
are less likely to buy, and are willing to pay less for touched
products. Furthermore, we find that simply imagining the
products being touched by others was sufficient in eliciting
feelings of disgust on the part of consumers and that this
disgust led to the negative implications on evaluations and
purchase intent.
Similarly, in related work, Morales and Fitzsimons
(2007) find that the law of contagion also governs the way
consumers react to two products that touch each other.
They show that when a disgusting source product comes
into contact with a recipient product either on a shelf dis-
play or in a grocery cart, the disgusting product transfers its
offensive properties to the recipient product, thus lowering
evaluations of the recipient product. For example, when a
package of lard touches a package of rice cakes, the rice
cakes are viewed as more fattening and less desirable over-
all. Similar to the research on consumer contamination, dis-
gust is found to be the driver of these product contagion
effects.
Positive Versus Negative Contagion
Prior research in contagion has focused almost exclu-
sively on negative versus positive contagion and has found
negative effects to be stronger in both extent and intensity
(Rozin and Kalat 1971; Rozin, Markwith, and McCauley
1994). This difference is consistent with general learning
patterns exhibited by humans and other animals. Because
the risk involved in not responding to a negative event is
greater than the risk involved in not responding to a positive
event, learning tends to be faster and responses are of a
greater magnitude for negative events than for positive
ones. The emphasis on understanding negative contagion is
particularly notable in retail settings. To date, physical con-
tact between consumers and products (i.e., consumer con-
tamination) and between products (i.e., product contagion)
has only been shown to result in lower evaluations of the
target objects (Argo, Dahl, and Morales 2006; Morales and
Fitzsimons 2007). In all cases, the source person (i.e.,
another shopper) or object (i.e., another product) negatively
affects how consumers respond to the target object that has
been touched. As of yet, however, no positive contagion
effects have been experimentally documented.
The limited prior work examining positive contagion has
employed questionnaires in which participants are asked to
imagine wearing a sweater or shirt that has been in contact
with various sources that are either positive or negative and
then to rate how pleasant/unpleasant the imagined experi-
ence would be (Nemeroff and Rozin 1994; Rozin, Millman,