Me, we, and them. A context-sensitive model of social and vicarious consumer animosity

对消费者敌意的研究表明，消费者由于对原产国的敌意而拒绝特定的产品或服务。目前的文献采用了以个人为中心的视角，探讨了敌意效应的前因、调节因素和行为后果。然而，令人惊讶的是，现有的研究只关注个人决定因素，因为消费者的敌意是一种社会现象。本建议声称有必要考虑社会背景和跨文化差异，以便更有效地了解个人仇恨决定，并避免对社会及其相互关联的经济产生有害影响。提案进一步建议将过分简化的双头垄断敌意模式（A国对目标国B的敌意）扩展为更完整的基于网络的方法。这种方法考虑了对网络中其他行动者的直接和间接溢出效应。本项目将采用多方法方法对消费者敌意的语境敏感模型进行实证检验，以探索社会敌意的跨国差异、机制、时间变化和溢出效应。该提案努力回答四个研究问题。首先，基于来自15个国家的现有独特而丰富的数据集，拟议的项目将测试社会敌意背景的水平和影响在不同文化之间的差异。其次，以往的研究只调查了个体的仇恨驱动因素，而本研究则通过一系列实验审视了社会仇恨背景如何调节个体仇恨驱动因素对消费行为（即抵制）的影响，并探讨了描述性规范（即通常由他人做的事情）的作用。该项目还将应用内隐联想测试来调查社会仇恨背景是否以无意识和自动的方式影响个人消费决策。第三，在一项两国纵向研究中，该项目将测试社会敌意背景的变化是否反映在个人消费行为的变化中。最后，该项目将引入替代性仇恨的概念。一个国家的消费者对特定目标国家的敌意可能会影响与其他密切相关国家的关系。企业或政策制定者试图减少对一个国家的敌意，可能会引发网络其他节点的敌意，从而适得其反。这些假设将在跨国背景下的一系列实验中得到检验。回答这四个研究问题可以扩展国际市场研究和消费者行为的知识。由于具有重大管理和政策影响的社会和政治观点，这些发现将引起更广泛受众的兴趣。

Research on consumer animosity indicates that consumers reject specific products or services due to their animosity towards the country of origin. The current body of literature employed an individual-centered perspective and explored the antecedents, moderators, and behavioral consequences of the animosity effect. However, it is surprising that the extant research has solely focused on individual determinants, as consumer animosity is a social phenomenon. The present proposal claims that it is necessary to consider the social context and cross-cultural differences to understand the individual animosity decision more effectively and to avoid harmful implications for societies and their interrelated economies. The proposal further recommends extending the overly simplified duopoly animosity models (animosity of country A towards target country B) to a more complete network-based approach. Such an approach takes into account direct and indirect spill-over effects to other actors in the network. The proposed project will empirically test the suggested context-sensitive model of consumer animosity using a multi-method approach to explore cross-national differences as well as the mechanisms, temporal variations, and spill-over effects in social animosity. The proposal strives to answer four research questions. First, based on an existing unique and rich dataset from 15 countries, the proposed project will test how the level and the impact of the social animosity context varies cross-culturally. Second, whereas previous studies investigated only individual animosity drivers, this research scrutinizes in a series of experiments how the social animosity context moderates the influence of the individual animosity drivers on consumption behavior (i.e., boycotting) and explores the role of de-scriptive norms (i.e., what is usually done by others). The project will also apply implicit association tests to investigate whether the social animosity context affects the individual consumption decision in an unconscious, and automatic manner. Third, in a bi-national longitudinal study, the project will test whether changes in the social animosity context are reflected in changes in individual consumption behaviors over time. Finally, the project will introduce the concept of vicarious animosity. Feelings of animosity among consumers in one country towards a given target country might affect the relationship with other closely related countries. Attempts of companies or policymakers to reduce animosity towards one country might backfire by triggering animosity in other nodes of the network. These assumptions will be tested in a series of experiments in a cross-national context. An-swering the four research questions can extend the knowledge on international marketing research and consumer behavior. The findings will be of interest to an even wider audience due to the societal and political perspectives that have major managerial and policy implications.