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Gift-givers are often confronted with the possibility of choosing gifts that are inconsistent with their own attitudes (“attitude-inconsistent gifts”). For example, a gun opposer may be faced with the possibility of choosing gun paraphernalia as a gift, and a vegetarian might be forced to consider the possibility of choosing a steakhouse gift card as a gift. This study aims to compare givers’ decision-making when they are confronted with the possibility of choosing attitude-inconsistent gifts with their decision-making when they are faced with the possibility of choosing gifts that are neither inconsistent nor consistent with their attitudes (“attitude-neutral gifts”).

Seven experimental studies test the hypotheses. These studies have participants make decisions as givers and use a variety of gifts, giver-recipient relationships, gifting occasions and dependent variables, as well as both consequential and hypothetical decisions.

Givers strategically avoid choosing attitude-inconsistent (vs attitude-neutral) gifts, even when they believe that these kinds of gifts are the ones that recipients desire the most. This aversion emerges because givers anticipate that choosing an attitude-inconsistent (vs attitude-neutral) gift would cause them to experience a higher level of psychological discomfort.

This research documents a novel gift-giving phenomenon (givers’ aversion to attitude-inconsistent gifts), one of the most widespread forms of intentional preference-mismatching in gift-giving (givers’ avoidance of attitude-inconsistent gifts when they believe that these kinds of gifts are the ones that recipients desire the most), and a psychological mechanism that has a strong influence on givers’ decision-making but was yet to be explored in the gift-giving literature (givers’ anticipations of psychological discomfort). Collectively, these facets improve the field’s understanding of consumer gift-giving and call into question the assumption that gift-giving is aimed predominantly at pleasing the recipient.

This research suggests that if gift-givers want to be more financially efficient, they should refrain from contemplating the feelings of psychological discomfort that they would experience from choosing an attitude-inconsistent gift and instead focus on selecting the gift that the recipient desires the most. Moreover, it indicates that gift-givers’ tendency to avoid preferred, attitude-inconsistent gifts can have undesirable social and well-being consequences. Finally, it suggests that firms’ bottom lines may be harmed by givers’ aversion to attitude-inconsistent gifts, and that firms selling products that are likely attitude-inconsistent for segments of consumers should think carefully about advertising those products as gifts.

The gift-giving literature has recently documented multiple cases of givers intentionally refraining from choosing the gifts that they believe best match recipients’ preferences. Yet, the present work shows that there was a considerable gap in this segment of the gift-giving literature. Specifically, the present research documents a previously unexplored, but highly common, instance in which intentional preference-mismatching in gift-giving occurs: whenever a potential gift is attitude-inconsistent. Moreover, this work sheds light on a psychological mechanism that plays an important role in givers’ decision-making but was yet to be explored in the gift-giving literature: givers’ anticipated feelings of psychological discomfort.

The purpose of the study was (1) to examine the motivational composites determining consumers' continued intention to use digital ticketing via self-service technology (SST) by integrating service satisfaction and (2) to ascertain the differences between consumers according to their psychological discomfort toward technology.

Data were collected using a structured questionnaire, and a total of 323 were included in the analysis. Partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) was utilized to test motivational determinants of digital ticketing. In addition, permutation-based multi-group analysis was performed to investigate the differences between consumers with high and low technology discomfort.

Both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation are positive predictors of continued intention to use digital ticketing, but only intrinsic motivation has a positive impact on continued intention through service satisfaction. Moreover, the relationship between intrinsic motivation, service satisfaction and continued intention was stronger for consumers with high psychological discomfort than those with low psychological discomfort.

Given the conspicuous characteristics of the digital ticketing process for sporting events, the insights gained from the study may be of assistance to researchers and practitioners in understanding sport consumers' ticket consumption behavior and the determinants of SST usage.

This study aims to offer a conceptual framework that elaborates on how tourists’ perception of contradictory features in reviews’ factuality and comprehension – within a single hotel review and across multiple hotel reviews – trigger attitude ambivalence and psychological discomfort, which determine their behaviors – choice deferral and hotel booking intentions. It also investigates the moderating role of anticipated conflicting reactions (ACRs) through contradictory features on consumers’ attitude ambivalence.

Using a Chinese setting, researchers collected data from 524 inbound tourists who were the consumers of hotels in Beijing. The study used IBM Amos 23.0 to test measurement and structural models for the proposed relationships. It also used PROCESS macro 3.4 for the moderation analysis.

The findings reveal a positive association between contradictory features in reviews and the resulting ambivalence that affects consumers’ discomfort and leads to the decision to defer the choice of hotel. Conversely, consumers’ discomfort has a positive impact on the hotel booking intentions. ACRs have positive moderating effects on the associations between contradictory features and consumers’ attitude ambivalence.

By investigating the contradictory features in hotel reviews, this study extends the body of research on dual information processing (i.e. the heuristic–systematic model) and the literature on service management, psychological behaviors, travel intermediaries and hotel firms. Future research directions are recommended for tourism and hospitality researchers.

This study aims to examine cultural differences between Easterners and Westerners in processing preference‐inconsistent information. The focal question that the study addresses is as follows: When faced with negative information about their preferred alternative, do Easterners and Westerners respond differently? If yes, how do these differences impact purchase intentions?

A total of 102 students from a major Korean university and 96 students from a major Canadian university participated in the study. The experiment involved reading fictitious but realistic product reviews about a new car model and responding to survey questions.

The authors find that, compared to Eastern consumers, Western consumers are affected differently by preference‐inconsistent information. They experience a greater level of cognitive discomfort, exhibit a stronger motivation to reduce that discomfort, and attempt to resolve the conflict between their original preference and inconsistent information. These factors lead to a significant reduction in their purchase intentions.

The use of student subjects may limit the generalizability of the study's findings.

Marketers can benefit by knowing that negative information about a product (as, say, in an online review) does not have a uniform effect across cultures. Consumers in Eastern cultures are more capable of handling negative information without reversing their product preferences. Western consumers, on the other hand, will strive to resolve the conflict between their preference (positive affect) and the negative product review (negative affect) by either changing their preference or discounting the review. Mostly, the damaging effects of a negative review are likely to be greater in Western cultures.

This study is the first attempt at examining the effect of cultural differences on processing preference‐inconsistent information. As organizations become more global, understanding culture‐based differences in information processing can help marketers create a more nuanced marketing strategy.

This study aims to examine the extent to which clients’ perceptions of a financial auditor’s communication style affect their psychological comfort and trust when considering whether to retain the incumbent firm for future financial audits.

A multistage method was used comprising integrated results from a literature review and findings from five in-depth interviews with chief financial officers of listed firms. A cross-sectional survey then yielded valid responses from 190 incorporated firms listed on The Stock Exchange of Thailand or Market for Alternative Investment.

The results reveal that, consistent with social interaction theory, an affiliation communication style positively influenced client’s psychological comfort and trust in an auditor. On the other hand, a dominant communications style negatively impacted psychological comfort. Cognitive social capital was found to moderate the links between dominant communication–psychological comfort, psychological comfort–trust and trust–relationship commitment.

From a managerial perspective, an affiliation communication style is fundamental for building client comfort and trust, especially for professional service firms, but especially in Eastern collectivist cultures that are relationship rich, where people seek to avoid conflict and prefer indirect communication styles over more direct styles.

This research highlights the central role that interpersonal communication style plays in developing psychological comfort and trust with a professional service firm. In addition, this study introduces the role of client psychological comfort as a key mediator between communications and trust.

The purpose of this study is to empirically investigate the determinants and consequences of psychological reactance in the online shopping context. Leveraging the psychological reactance and self-congruity theories, functional and symbolic discrepancies enhance the psychological reactance toward online shopping. In addition, trustworthiness moderates the impact of online customers attitude ambivalence on their psychological reactance.

The authors conduct an empirical study on online customer cognitive factors. In this research paper, the postpositivism research view is used. The Smart PLS-SEM is used to analyze the data.

The current study findings reveal that self-concept and operational incongruence (i.e. symbolic and functional) are the main factors that lead to psychological reactance and resulting in online shopping hate. Poor website quality and other matters are so significant they create functional incongruence. Moreover, low trustworthiness strengthens psychological reactance in the online shopping hate context.

This study extends the psychological reactance and self-congruence theories to online shopping. Previously, literature has extensively studied the social commerce intention.

This paper aims to clarify the effect of attitudinal ambivalence on resistance to anti-smoking persuasion through information processing styles. It was hypothesized that a high smoker’s ambivalence, induced by an anti-smoking persuasive message, triggers among smokers both a reflective and a non-reflective information processing. In turn, both the information processing styles were supposed to be predictors of the resistance to anti-smoking persuasion.

An experiment and a survey were conducted on a random sample of 347 smokers in this regard.

The findings indicated that smokers feel ambivalent toward anti-smoking messages in print ads and tend to process them both analytically and superficially. Also, it seems that only the analytical processing triggers resistance to anti-smoking persuasion.

The author reports on the importance of attitudinal ambivalence and information processing in the resistance to anti-smoking persuasion process. The paper should be of interest to readers in the areas of health communication and social marketing. This work seems to be important to the extent that few works have highlighted the causal and linear effect of a persuasive anti-smoking message on smokers’ ambivalence, information processing and resistance to persuasion. The findings in this paper seem interesting insofar, as they show the importance of the negative emotional appeal in the ambivalence, analytical information processing and resistance triggering.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of workplace bullying on innovative work behavior and neglect with defensive silence as a mediator. The study further examines if the presence of friendship networks in the workplace can weaken the negative impact of workplace bullying.

Data were collected through self-report questionnaires from 835 full-time Indian managerial employees working in different Indian organizations.

Results revealed that workplace bullying negatively related to innovative work behavior and positively related to neglect. Defensive silence mediated bullying–outcomes relationships and effects of workplace bullying on proposed outcomes were weaker in the presence of high workplace friendship.

A cross-sectional design and use of self-reported questionnaire data are few limitations of this study.

The study extended the current research stream of workplace bullying to one of the underrepresented developing Asian countries, India. The study also contributes in terms of its sample characteristics as it covers managerial employees working across different organizations.

Many western consumers have become sensitive to the negative effects of their consumption levels in many product categories and those new attitudes are challenging their habitual consumption behaviors. How do dissonant attitudes influence the process toward behavioral change? How does external information reinforce those conflicting attitudes with new dissonant cognitions and foster intentions to modify behavior? This study aims to propose a conceptual model, based on cognitive dissonance theory, which introduces psychological discomfort as an important mediator toward behavioral change intentions.

Two studies are conducted. Using structural equation modeling under Amos, hypotheses are tested and validated in the field of meat consumption on a sample of 501 French consumers. A second study investigates the impact of the nature of the stimulus on consumers’ responses.

The results show that psychological discomfort is increased by the contact with dissonant external information and that consumers may at the same time minimize the effects of additional cognition by implementing informational strategies such as trivialization or decredibilization to defend their consumption behavior.

Future researchers could consider the various objections to meat consumption separately and further explore the dynamics between external information, consumer cognitions and consumer consumption behavior in diverse consumption contexts.

The authors advise meat marketers to reduce consumer psychological discomfort by promoting the hedonic perceived value and by presenting credible counterarguments to defend the benefits of their products.

The study may encourage advocates of lower meat consumption to provide credible information about the detrimental effects of meat consumption to influence behavioral change intentions.

As responsible consumption becomes a key trend in western societies, new attitudes, fostered by external critical information, are influencing consumption behavior in many product categories. This research contributes to a better understanding of the attitude–behavior gap in a context of emerging criticism toward highly consumed and traditional products.

This chapter of exploratory nature aims to provide an account of the reviewed literature and presents some empirical cases to come to conceptualize dogs as social actors with different legitimate roles in the working, social, private, economic, and family life of human beings.

This chapter is the product of a research inspired by the great interest of the authors on rising awareness of the importance of dogs in human working lives. For this, a purposive literature review took place; we consulted scientific studies databases, and also gathered information from market research agencies, and other general media resources. To have a more comprehensive view, and to respond to a specific question on dogs at the workplace, a selection of cases is used to illustrate. For the case studies, secondary data research was used, and individual, structured interviews were conducted and analyzed.

This chapter reviews the relationship between humans and animals. It identifies attitudes and perception toward animals, highlighting the evolution of the intimate bond and the deep relationship between dogs and humans. It describes some cases of dogs as working beings at the service of human functions and dimensions of the pet care markets. Finally, it presents some cases of pet-friendly work environments.

The novel contribution of this chapter is putting dogs in the management of diversity academic literature. In this study, we find that the role, meaning, and purpose of dogs in people’s lives (and in many cases in organizations) are being underestimated. Including and making visible the presence of dogs in the personal, work, and well-being of people represents challenges to be addressed by managers. Additionally, it represents challenges to think about and investigate the welfare of dogs that interact with human beings in productive environments.