How Entitativity Influences Sharers’ Attitude in Intergroup Communication: Focusing on eWOM Communication between Chinese and Japanese Consumers

Abstract

With the development of new media and machine translation technology, consumers from different countries who speak other languages can easily communicate. This study aimed to explore the impact of such cross-border customer-to-customer interactions by introducing the saying-is-believing paradigm within the electronic word-of-mouth context. The saying-is-believing effect has been defined as a phenomenon in sharers’ memory, and impressions can be biased when sharing an audience-tuned message. By introducing the saying-is-believing paradigm in the electronic word-of-mouth context, we suggested that audience-tuned statements are likely to bias sharers’ memory and impression toward the attitude of an entitative in-group audience. In contrast, such audience tuning effects are unlikely to occur when low entitativity is perceived in the audiences or when the audiences are perceived as an out-group. We designed an online experiment to investigate these assumptions and recruited 128 Chinese undergraduate students in a Beijing university. Manipulations of entitativity perception (high: common points in attitude, etc.; low: different points in attitude, etc.) and intergroup membership (in-group: Chinese audience group; out-group: Japanese audience group) were included in the experimental procedure. Findings in this study shed insights on the possible influence of cross-border communication on consumers’ attitude formation toward the communication topic.