Mood as a Moderator of Social Norm’s Influence: An Abstract

Abstract

Social norms are an influential driver of consumers’ preferences in different domains of everyday life (Cialdini et al. 2006; Melnyk et al. 2009) and are extensively used in marketing campaigns, as well as in political and social campaigns. Consumers are exposed to social norm information when they are in a good and when they are in a bad mood. The impact of mood on the effectiveness of persuasive messages is considerable (Bless et al. 1990). It plays an important role in the way consumers learn, interpret, and remember information (Forgas 1989) and can interfere with people’s ability to process persuasive messages (Mackie and Worth 1989). The effect of social norms on consumers’ decision-making depends not only on mood but also on the formulation of the social norm. Social norms can be formulated as descriptive norms, which describe what most others do in a given situation, or as injunctive norms, which prescribe certain behavior in a given situation (Cialdini et al. 1990). Different reasons drive conformity to injunctive versus descriptive norms, and consumers process the information that each norm conveys differently (Prislin and Wood 2005). Despite a large body of research on social norms (see Goldstein and Cialdini 2009) and on the role of mood in consumer behavior (see Gardner 1985), little is known about the effect of mood on social norms’ influence. This study contributes to our understanding of the influence of social norms on decision-making by showing how mood affects the influence of descriptive compared to injunctive norm formulations on consumers’ attitudes, purchase intentions, as well as on real behavior. The results of the two experiments show that the effect of norm formulation on attitudes, intentions, and behavior depends on the mood of consumers. Facing a descriptive norm under negative mood (vs. positive mood) makes attitudes and intentions (but not behavior) more congruent with the normative message. In contrast, injunctive norms have a greater influence on attitudes, intentions, and behavior under positive than under negative mood. Furthermore, we show that this effect translates to actual (donations) behavior. Experiment 2 shows that the effect is due to cognitive deliberation, as the effects disappear when cognitive deliberation is hindered. Our results indicate that social norms should be carefully chosen and used depending on the context in which the information supported by the norm is processed by the consumer. The study has theoretical implications as well. Previously, negative mood was shown to decrease consumer’s evaluations of received information and persuasive messages (Miniard et al. 1992). Our study shows that mood not only changes the responsiveness of consumers to social norms for attitudes and intentions, but it does so differently for the two norm formulations. In particular, the negative effect of bad mood on responsiveness to persuasive information can be reversed by using descriptive norm formulations rather than injunctive norms.