Index of Paper Presentations for the Parallel Sessions - Academy of ...

MethodStudy 1 featured a 2 (concrete versus abstract message) by 2 (short-term versus long-term primedtemporal goal orientation) full-factorial MANOVA design. To ensure external validity, themessage arguments were examined by two independent coders. Only messages that consistentlyfeatured concrete or abstract messages were considered for the study. Actual content from twowebsites was then selected by researchers for pre-testing.Stimuli. The message concreteness manipulation featured a secondhand smoking context.Manipulation was undertaken using a fictional ―beta-version‖ anti-smoking webpage. Participantswere told that the anti-smoking website, sponsored by a healthcare organization, was underconstruction and would soon be online. The participants in the concrete (abstract) messagecondition browsed a web page with the headline, ―Tobacco companies sell time bombs (healthrisks)!‖ followed by the message, ―Every time people smoke a cigarette, they implant a timebomb in (spread health risks to) those close to them. Every time people breathe next to smokers,they inhale time bombs (health risks). Secondhand smoke kills. It‘s only a matter oftime…Remember, tobacco companies sell time bombs (health risks).‖ The stimuli (i.e., timebomb and health risks) held similar in denotative meaning. For example, both implied a certaindegree of uncertainty regarding a future negative event, but were designed to differ onconcreteness.Based on Liu and Aaker (2007), temporal orientation was manipulated by asking participants toenvision their life in the near or distant future (Liu and Aaker 2007). The participants in the longterm(short term) orientation condition received the following instructions:In this study, we are interested in people‘s long-term (short-term) projection for themselves.Please think about what your life might be like 50 years from now (next week). Then in the boxbelow, please write a brief description of how you envision your life in 50 years (in next week)(e.g., what might you be like; what might you be doing, etc.). Please note that there are not rightor wrong answers here. Please provide honest and sincere answers.Subjects and Procedure. One-hundred and eighteen undergraduate business students from a majorAmerican university participated in the study 1 for partial course credit. Research shows thatregular smokers usually react to anti-smoking advertisements differently from nonsmokers andoccasional smokers. Regular smokers tend to counterargue anti-smoking messages (Romer andJamieson 2001). Given that such difference may confound the persuasion attempts in thisresearch, regular smokers were excluded, reducing the sample to 111 (male = 42%; nonsmokers =83%; occasional smokers = 17%). Participants completed the 20-minute online survey task in acomputer lab. The four-item scale used by Menon, Block, and Ramanathan (2002) was adapted tomeasure attitude toward the webpage. Six items gauged participants‘ intention to avoidsecondhand smoke (e.g., ―During the coming few months, you will avoid secondhand smoke atany time‖). Processing fluency was gauged using four items on ease of processing (Lee andAaker 2004; Thompson and Hamilton 2006). Flow was directly measured using a two-item scalefollowing a narrative description of flow developed by Novak, Hoffman, and Yung (2000). Allmeasures employed seven-point scales. Scale reliabilities ranged from .70 to .94. Items wereaveraged to obtain composite scores for the main constructs.ResultsManipulation Checks. First, the effectiveness of message concreteness manipulation wasexamined. As desired, the webpage containing a concrete message was rated to be significantlymore vivid than the webpage with an abstract message (MAbstract= 4.05 and MConcrete = 4.65, t(109) = -2.25, p < .03). Then, the subjects‘ recall of the webpage information was coded by twoindependent judges who were blind to the manipulation (inter-coder reliability = .94). Analysis ofthese data showed that in the abstract(concrete) message condition, 69%(89%) of the participantscorrectly recalled that the message contained ―health risks,‖(―time bomb‖) Therefore, themessage concreteness manipulation was successful.