ASSOCIATION FOR CONSUMER RESEARCH

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Attitudes and Behaviors Assessment: the Impact of the Hypothetical Bias Caroline Roux, McGill University, Canada Ulf Böckenholt, McGill University, Canada and Northwestern University, USA

Environmentally conscious consumers tend to express recurrent equivocal commitment to the environment. Why so? This paper provides an explanation for this lack of “true” reporting from the hypothetical bias literature, by showing that people express stronger attitudes and behavioral intentions in a hypothetical context than in a real one.

[to cite]: Caroline Roux and Ulf Böckenholt (2011) ,"Attitudes and Behaviors Assessment: the Impact of the Hypothetical Bias", in NA - Advances in Consumer Research Volume 38, eds. Darren W. Dahl, Gita V. Johar, and Stijn M.J. van Osselaer, Duluth, MN : Association for Consumer Research.

[url]: http://www.acrwebsite.org/volumes/16202/volumes/v38/NA-38

[copyright notice]: This work is copyrighted by The Association for Consumer Research. For permission to copy or use this work in whole or in part, please contact the Copyright Clearance Center at http://www.copyright.com/. 876 / Working Papers MacElroy, Bill (2000), “Variables influencing dropout rates in Web-based surveys”, Quirk’s Marketing Research Review, 2000 (June). Manfreda, Katja L. and Vasja Vehovar (2008), “Internet Surveys,“ in The International Handbook of Survey Methodology, ed. Edit D. De Leeuw, Joop J. Hox, Don A. Dillman, New York, NY: Erlbaum, 264-84. O’Neil, Kevin M. and Steven D. Penrod (2001), “Webbased Research: Methodological Variables’ Effects on Dropout and Sample Characteristics,” Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, 33(2), 226-33. Sheehan, Kim B. (2001), “E-mail Survey Response Rates: A Review,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 6(2), 1-20. Shermis, Mark D. and Danielle Lombard (1999), “A Comparison of Survey Data Collected by Regular Mail and Electronic Mail Questionnaires,” Journal of Business & , 14(2), 341-54. Tourangeau, Roger (1984), “Cognitive Sciences and Survey Methods,” in Cognitive Aspects of Survey Methodology: Building a Bridge Between Disciplines, ed. Thomas B. Jabine, Miron L. Straf, Judith M. Tanur, and Roger Tourangeau, Washington D.C.: National Academy Press, 73-100. Tourangeau, Roger, Lance J. Rips, and Kenneth Rasinski (2000), The Psychology of Survey Response, New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Tuten, Tracy L., Michael Bosnjak, and Wolfgang Bandilla (2000), “Banner-advertised Web surveys,” Marketing Research, 11(4), 17- 21. Tuten, Tracy L., Mirta Galesic, and Michael Bosnjak (2004), “Effects of Immediate Versus Delayed Notification of Prize Draw Results on Response Behavior in Web Surveys: An Experiment,” Social Science Computer Review, 22 (3), 377-84. Weisberg, Herbert F. (2005), The Total Survey Error Approach, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Williams, Michele (2001), ”In whom we trust: Group membership as an affective context for trust development,” Academy of Management Review, 26(3), 377-96.

Attitudes and Behaviors Assessment: The Impact of the Hypothetical Bias Caroline Roux, McGill University, Canada Ulf Böckenholt, McGill University, Canada and Northwestern University, USA

Extended Abstract Surveys consistently show that people are voicing strong support for environmental protection, but they seem to be paying lip service when an investigator asks whether they are taking actions to save the planet from climate change (Dolliver 2008). But why do environmentally conscious consumers tend to express recurrent equivocal or “aspirational” commitment to the environment (Dolliver 2008)? According to Cotte and Trudel (2009), we should not be surprised that consumers state to hold very positive attitudes toward the environment when surveyed about their environmental opinions, since survey researchers seem to rarely try to find subtle ways of eliciting more “true” responding. This suggests that the way consumers are surveyed about their pro-environmental attitudes and behavioral intentions can hinder their “true” reporting, and the goal of this paper is to better understand how survey formats can influence attitudinal and behavioral assessments.

Background The hypothetical bias is an overestimation of willingness to pay in hypothetical or contingent markets, when compared to actual payments in otherwise identical real cash markets (Ajzen, Brown, and Carvajal 2004). This bias also applies to contingent valuation in the context of a referendum, where individuals that are confronted with a real referendum about contributing money to a worthy goal express less favorable reactions with respect to voting yes than individuals who are confronted with a hypothetical referendum (Ajzen, Brown, and Carvajal 2004). This suggests that hypothetical and real contexts are construed in very different ways, that they are qualitatively different, and that questions posed in such contexts can elicit very different responses (Ajzen, Brown, and Carvajal 2004). Moreover, according to Ajzen, Brown and Carvajal (2004), statements of willingness to pay in a hypothetical situation can be equated to behavioral intentions and the hypothetical bias to a discrepancy between intentions and behavior. We thus hypothesize that people should express different levels of attitudes in different contexts:

H1: People express stronger attitudes and behavioral intentions in a hypothetical context than in a real one.

Different ways to adjust for the bias have been demonstrated, but they mainly apply to contingent valuation studies (e.g., asking participants to respond as if they were really spending their money; Ajzen, Brown, and Carvajal 2004). However, it seems that for contingent valuation survey to elicit useful information about willingness-to-pay, respondents must understand exactly what they are being asked to value (Johnston 2006). Hence, familiarity may lead to closer correspondence between intentions and behavior, and thus reduce or even eliminate the hypothetical bias (Johnston 2006). We thus hypothesize that familiarity could moderate the effect:

H2: People express similar attitudes and behavioral intentions in both concrete and hypothetical conditions when surveyed about familiar behaviors.

Furthermore, when people are asked to report an attitude, they often infer this attitude from the implications of a past behavior that happens to be salient to them at the time of the reporting (Albarracin and Wyer 2000). In fact, subjective judgments of attitude certainty, intensity, and importance are affected by the subjective ease of retrieval of experiences that accompany the recollection of attitude- relevant information (Haddock et al. 1999). In addition, construal level theory states that people represent hypothetical tasks in a more Advances in Consumer Research (Volume 38) / 877 abstract, high-level terms, and real tasks in a more concrete, low-level terms (Armor and Sackett 2006; Trope, Liberman, and Wakslak 2007). Consequently, we hypothesize that reporting behavioral intentions could have the same effect as making salient past behavior on people’s attitude assessment, and that the hypothetical bias should moderate the informational value of behavioral intentions:

H3: Behavioral intentions are used as more abstract information in a hypothetical context and as more concrete information in a real context in further assessments.

Study These propositions were tested within the realm of environmental protection. Respondents (114 undergraduate students) pledged to perform behaviors from statements (Roberts 1996) that were formulated either in a hypothetical or a concrete way. Results from the study provided support for our hypotheses. When asked to pledge to perform hypothetical behaviors (e.g., I pledge that I would buy), participants expressed greater behavioral intentions than when asked to pledge to perform actual behaviors (e.g., I pledge to buy; 4.26 vs. 3.31, p<0.001), which supports H1. Moreover, familiarity seems to moderate this effect, since there is no significant difference between the hypothetical and the concrete conditions (4.15 vs. 3.98, p>0.1) for what appears to be more familiar behaviors (i.e., behaviors that are performed inside the home–e.g., recycle, save energy and water), while there is a significant effect (4.03 vs. 3.54, p<0.05) on less familiar, and maybe less concrete behaviors (i.e., behaviors that are performed outside the home or related to social activities in support of the cause–e.g., buying fair-trade or organic products, convincing friends to be more eco-friendly), thus supporting H2. Furthermore, when in a hypothetical condition, participants expressed stronger attitudinal self-relevance with the environment than in the concrete condition (3.97 vs. 3.76). On the other hand, when in a concrete condition, participants stated that they perform more actual behaviors that in the hypothetical condition (3.48 vs. 3.81). The interaction effect is significant (p=0.05). People thus seem to be inferring their attitudes from the actions that they are willing to do and their level of hypotheticality, since there is a match between “would-behavior” and self-relevance and between “do-behavior” and reported behaviors, providing support for H3.

Discussion Our study shows that there is a hypothetical bias in the pro-environmental domain, that this bias affects how people assess their attitudes and behaviors, and that it is moderated by familiarity. Moreover, making people think more abstractly or more concretely about their behaviors affects their self-relevance or their retrieval memory of past behaviors, respectively. The next step is to try to better understand the process underlying the hypothetical bias, and to establish a link with actual behavior, in order to determine whether the hypothetical bias results in more or less actual behavioral consistency.

References Ajzen, Icek, Thomas C. Brown and Franklin Carvajal (2004). Explaining the Discrepancy between Intentions and Actions: The Case of Hypothetical Bias in Contingent Valuation, Personality and Bulletin, 30, 1108-20. Albarracin, Dolores and Robert S. Wyer, Jr. (2000). “The Cognitive Impact of Past Behavior: Influences on Beliefs, Attitudes, and Future Behavioral Decisions.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79 (1), 5-22. Armor, David A. and Aaron M. Sackett (2006). “Accuracy, Error, and Bias in Predictions for Real Versus Hypothetical Events,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 91 (4), 583–600. Cotte, June and Remi Trudel (2009). Socially Conscious Consumerism, A Systematic Review of the Body of Knowledge, Report from the Network for Business Sustainability Knowledge Project Series. Dolliver, Mark (2008), “Deflating a Myth, Consumers aren’t as devoted to the planet as you wish they were,” Adweek, (accessed November 2, 2009), [available at http://www.adweek.com /aw/ content_display/news/strategy/e3i5e732e045deaaba3ef1cd271cfd0d102]. Haddock, Geoffrey, Alexander J. Rothman, Rolf Reber, and (1999). “Forming Judgments of Attitude Certainty, Intensity, and Importance: The Role of Subjective Experiences,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 25 (7), 771-782. Johnston, Robert J. (2006). “Is hypothetical bias universal? Validating contingent valuation responses using a binding public referendum,” Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, 52 (1), 469-81. Roberts, James A. (1996). “Green Consumers in the 1990s: Profile and Implications for Advertising,” Journal of Business Research, 36, 217-31. Trope, Yaacov, Nira Liberman, and Cheryl Wakslak (2007). “Construal Levels and Psychological Distance: Effects on Representation, Prediction, Evaluation, and Behavior,” Journal of Consumer Psychology, 17 (2), 83-95.

The Abstractness of Luxury Jochim Hansen, New York University, USA Michaela Wänke, University of Basel, Switzerland

Almost everyday, consumers buy and use commodities such as food, clothing, or other necessities. Sometimes, however, they may indulge in luxurious goods (Kivetz and Simonson, 2002). Yet, luxury purchases are exceptions to the rule as they occur rather seldom and often are merely hypothetical. Moreover, luxury cannot be purchased everywhere; it is usually limited and for most people difficult to attain (Miyazaki, Grewal, and Goodstein, 2005; Nuemo and Quelch, 1998; Silverstein and Fiske, 2003). As such, luxury is something that only a few people can