Examining the Influence of Emotional Expressions in Online Consumer Reviews on Perceived Helpfulness
Introduction
Online consumer reviews (OCRs), also referred to as electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM), allow individuals to share their experiences and opinions about the purchase decision-making process. OCRs can be seen as an evaluation of the product or service, including product features, service quality, detailed consumption processes, and overall perception. A recent industry survey report from BrightLocal (2019) indicated that OCRs exert a powerful influence. The survey found that 89% of potential consumers read reviews, and 91% of them trust OCRs as much as personal recommendations. Today, a wide range of OCRs are available for potential consumers to read, requiring a significant investment in time and effort to find the product information that is most helpful. As a result, website operators have invested in establishing rating systems that will be perceived as reliable by utilizing peer reviews and monitoring mechanisms that streamline the overwhelming number of available reviews, thereby assisting potential consumers to find trustworthy content. Amazon was the first online platform to adopt a peer-voting system (known as Helpfulness Votes) for potential customers to score the perceived helpfulness of a given review. This simple mechanism has brought the company approximately USD $270 million in additional revenue (Spool, 2009). Thereafter, perceived helpfulness began to serve as an important benchmark for academic studies on OCRs (Wan & Nakayama, 2014). Previous research on the determinants of OCR helpfulness has indicated that it can be affected by the rating, the length of the review (e.g., Forman, Ghose, & Wiesenfeld, 2008; Mudambi & Schuff, 2010; Pan & Zhang, 2011; Schlosser, 2011), and the review's readability (e.g., Korfiatis, García-Bariocanalb, & Sánchez-Alonso, 2012).
More recently, a stream of empirical research has emerged on emotional expression, which is abundant in OCRs and can exert a substantial impact on potential consumer's judgments (Schindler & Bickart, 2012; Kim & Gupta, 2012). This line of study generally falls into two categories: the valence-based approach and the appraisal-tendency approach (Lerner & Keltner, 2000; Gang & Taeho, 2019). Research shows that the valence-based approach, which focuses on the positive versus negative value of affect, is found to have a significant impact on the helpfulness of the review (e.g., Cao, Duan, & Gan, 2011; Garcia & Schweitzer, 2011; Kim & Gupta, 2012; Schindler & Bickart, 2012; Baek, Ahn, & Choi, 2012; Siering & Muntermann, 2013). However, the appraisal-tendency approach focuses on the role of specific emotions having a distinct effect on readers’ perceptions of a review's helpfulness (e.g., Ahmad and Laroche, 2015; Yin, Bond, & Zhang, 2014; Gang & Taeho, 2019). The valence-based approach is consistent with the principle of simplicity, while the appraisal-tendency approach reflects the specific and detailed differentiations among different positive and negative emotions (Lerner & Keltern, 2000).
However, the OCR setting represents a “sender-receiver” context in which reviewers (the senders) write a review of product-relevant content, and readers (the receivers) later make sense of both the content and the reviewer. To compensate for the inability to communicate non-verbally online, consumers choose to share their opinions using emotional wording (Reilly & Seibert, 2003). Abundant evidence has shown that people experience emotions in consumption situations, which might include surprise, pride, anger, and fear (Johnson & Stewart, 2005). It is generally accepted that emotional expression in OCRs influences the perceived helpfulness of reviews by providing signals relating to purchase decisions. In particular, the underlying psychological mechanisms of emotional expression influencing attitude formation are not fully understood. The majority of emotional expression research on OCRs has focused on the effects of discrete emotions in the similar valence on perceive review helpfulness. There is limited research comparing the effect of positive emotions with negative emotions embedded in the reviews (Deng, & Ravichandran, 2018; ISmagilova, Dwivedi & Slade, 2019). Recently, studies demonstrated the differential impact of emotions expression on review helpfulness was explained by beliefs regarding the cognitive effort of reviewers (Yin, Bond & Zhang, 2014). Based on previous study, the first aims of this study are as follows:
- (1)
Explore how reviewers’ emotional expressions in OCRs affect readers’ perceptions of the review's helpfulness through their perceived cognitive effort.
In addition, different readers could vary in their interpretation of the same expression of emotion in OCRs. Research indicates that males and females may use significantly different processing strategies or prefer to process different types of messages (Darley & Smith, 1995). However, little research has focused on the role of gender in readers’ perceptions and use of OCRs. Therefore, the second aims of this study are as follows:
- (1)
Investigate how gender differences moderate the relationship between emotional expressions in OCRs and readers’ perceptions of the reviewer's effort.
Section snippets
Studies on the Impact of Online Reviews Content on Perceived Helpfulness
This research compiled 20 studies related to the impact of online reviews content on perceived helpfulness, published between 2007 and 2019. We compared the studies in terms of authors, source of the reviews, the products/ services reviewed, the research method adopted, and the measured impact of the review content (including the four items of evaluation, word count, emotional expression, and readability) on readers’ perceived helpfulness (Table 1). The findings revealed several points in
Conceptual Framework and Hypotheses
We constructed a conceptual framework (Figure 2) based on the motivation and purpose of the research. First, referring to the cognitive appraisal theory of emotion, we attempted to classify the four different emotional expressions implied in online reviews into feelings of anger, fear, pride, and surprise. Then, using attribution theory as a theoretical basis, we analyzed how readers appreciate the effort made by reviewers and examined whether they perceive the reviews as helpful when
Methodology
A laboratory setting was used to test the six hypotheses based on consumers’ experience of the service of a restaurant. The emotional expression of the reviews was manipulated to measure the differences in readers’ perceived cognitive effort and helpfulness.
Experiment Participants
The participants in the experiment were undergraduate and postgraduate students recruited from universities through advertisements posted on campus noticeboards and school websites. The main advantages of adopting such a method were as follows: (1) it was easier to recruit participants from schools, and participants recruited through such channels were easy to control during the experiment; and (2) the researchers were expecting to conduct the experiment at different times, but in one specific
Discussion
The main objective of this research was to investigate the effects of specific emotions conveyed in OCRs on readers’ perception of a review's helpfulness. First, the results show that readers perceive that the reviewer exerted more cognitive effort when the emotions conveyed by the review were negative, compared to when the emotions conveyed were positive. Consumer behavior research has found that negative information has more value for the reader of reviews than positive information (Sen &
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Mei-Ju Chen: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software, Writing - original draft, Validation. Cheng-Kiang Farn: Data curation, Visualization, Investigation, Supervision, Writing - review & editing.
Acknowledgement
This study was supported by Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan, R. O. C. (MOST 104-2410-H-270-002; 108-2410-H-270-003)
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